
Class JiX^lM/ 
Book. i C k 3 



Copyright}^?. 



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THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 



THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

Its History 

Its Prayer Book 

Its Ministry 

FIVE LECTURES 



BY 

THOMAS F. GAILOR, ST.D. 

BISHOP OF TENNESSEE 



MILWAUKEE 

THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO. 

1914 






Copyright by 
THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO. 

1914 



AUG I 1914 

©Ci.A;:i76842 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

I HAVE CONSENTED to the publication of these lec- 
tures at the request of many people who heard them, 
and especially of the members of the Men's Bible Class 
of St. Paul's Church, Chattanooga, for whom the lec- 
tures on the Prayer Book were written. 

It is thought that the information presented in 
this brief and popular form may prove useful to per- 
sons enquiring about the Church, and who may in this 
way be led on to wider and fuller investigation. 

As the lectures were delivered at various times, and 
to different congregations, they necessarily involve 
some repetitions; but for the uninstructed reader this 
may be an advantage; and therefore they are allowed 
to stand as they were originally prepared. 

Thomas F. Gailor^ 

Easter, 19H* Bishop of Tennessee. 



TO 
THE VERY REV. JAMES CRAIK ^MORRIS, M.A., 

DEAN OF ST. Marty's cathedrae, Memphis, 

TENNESSEE, THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFEC- 
TIONATELY DEDICATED 



- \ 



CONTENTS 

The History of the Church of England . . 1 

The Book of Common Prayer 37 

The Book of Common Prayer as a Product of 

THE Reformation 59 

The Book of Common Prayer and the Doc- 
trinal AND Practical Abuses Which it 
Superseded 77 

The Historic Episcopate: Its Meaning and 
Value. A sermon preached at the consecra- 
tion of the Rev. James R. Winchester, D.D., 
as Bishop Coadjutor of Arkansas ... 95 



A Brief List of 
BOOKS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

I — ^Historical 

The Historians and the English Reformation. LittelL 1 vol. 
Reformation of the Church of England. J. H. Blunt. 2 vols. 
History of the Church of England. Canon Dixon. 6 vols. 
English Reformation. Bishop Collins. 1 vol. 
Introduction to History of Church of England. Rev. H. 0. 

Wakeman. 1 vol. 
Lectures on Reformation. Aubrey Moore. 1 vol, 
Ecclesia Anglican^. Jennings. 1 vol. 
The Church in America. Bishop Coleman. 1 vol. 
Eighteen Centuries of the Church in England. A. H. Hore. 

1 vol. 

II — Pkayer Book 

History of the Booh of Common Prayer. F. Procter, M.A. 

1 vol. 
The Book of Common Prayer. Samuel Hart, D.D., LL.D. 

1 vol. 
Annotated Booh of Common Prayer. J. H. Blunt, D.D, 

1 vol. 
The Book of Common Prayer. J. H. Benton. 1 vol. 
The Church in the Prayer Book. Temple. 1 vol. 
The Holy Spirit and the Prayer Book. Haughton. 1 vol. 

Ill — Theology and Ministry 

The Body of Chi^ist. Gore. 1 vol. 
The Incarnation. Wilberforce. 1 vol. 
Foundations of the Creed. Goodwyn. 1 vol. 
The Christian Church. Darwell Stone. 1 vol. 
Ministerial Priesthood. Moberly. 1 vol. 
The Christian Ministry. Gore. 1 vol. 




THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH 
OF ENGLAND 

HE religion of Christ is Catholic — a 
universal religion; that is to say, it is 
not limited in its appeal or consola- 
tions to any race or age or class or 
clime. To every man and woman that is born 
upon the earth it says : ^' You are one people, one 
family, one in hope and purpose, one in the Re- 
demption by the purple blood of Christ." 

And the appropriateness of Christianity to the 
needs of all races of men is one of the strongest 
evidences of its divine origin; although to the 
superficial observer, it confuses the history of its 
development. As a matter of fact the great insti- 
tutions and truths of the Gospel are like a stream 
flowing through the wilderness of human life and 
taking color from the banks through which it has 
to pass. The truths, the institutions, remain the 
same; but the different races of men have given 
them a variety of interpretation and expression. 

The brightness and joyousness of tempera- 
ment, the intellectual subtlety and playful fancy. 



2 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

of the Greek; demanded and created a type of 
Christian thought and worship easily distin- 
guished from that produced by the less intellectual 
and more practical, the more serious and law- 
loving Eoman; and the Christianity of the Teu- 
tonic people has ever differed, in its external ex- 
pression at least, from that of the Latin or Greek 
or Slavonic Race. We are Teutons. The race to 
which we owe our language and our social and 
political institutions is the Teutonic Race; and 
therefore the story of the development of these 
institutions is full of interest and instruction. 

The history of the Church of England, like 
the history of the English language and people, 
IS complicated by the existence of many separate 
factors of influence, that from time to time have 
checked or retarded or changed the course of its 
development. Yet its age, out-dating that of any 
national Church in the modern world; its insular 
position; its comparative freedom through long 
periods from external direction or control; have 
afforded it unequalled opportunity for the culti- 
vation of its o^vn special and peculiar characteris- 
tics, so that it presents to the student the fairest 
example of the National idea in Christianity that 
can be found anywhere to-day. From the very 
first the history of the English Church has been 
closely identified with the growth and progress of 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 3 

Anglo-Saxon liberties and Anglo-Saxon law; and 
the proper understanding of this history will 
gi'eatly contribute to the right estimate of both 
English and American political institutions. It 
cannot be said that our people at large fully ap- 
preciate the importance of this Church history. 
Religious and sectional prejudices have both com- 
bined to misrepresent the facts. Titles, dress, 
and social usages have obscured in the popular 
mind the real purpose and reason of the Church 
of our fathers. Bishops in the House of Lords — 
and Clergymen dependent upon their Patrons for 
their livings; the collection of tithes (which some 
people wrongly think are by act of Parliament), 
and the bygone legal disability of Dissent — ^these 
things have made the very name of the State 
Church, or the King's Church, unjDopular among 
many of our American people, and have led them 
to forget the real nature and character of that 
institution of which these things are only the un- 
necessary, unfortunate accidents. The object of 
this chapter is to sketch, as briefly and simply as 
may be, the history of the English Church, and 
to show, if possible, what is her due and lawful 
position to-day in Christendom. 

The history naturally divides itself into dis- 
tinct periods, well defined and easy to determine. 



4 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

They are: 

(1) The British period from the Eoman Con- 
quest of Britain to the Mission of Augus- 
tine, 596 A. D. ; 

(2) The Saxon period to the jSTorman Con- 
quest, 1066 A. D. ; 

(3) The Anglo-Koman period to the Eepudia- 
tion of the Papal Supremacy, A. D. 
1534; 

(4) The period of Transition and Reconstruc- 
tion from A. D. 1534 to A. D. 1662 ; and, 

(5) The Modern period. 

THE BRITISH CHURCH 

The early British Period need not detain us 
long. The evidence is meagre and comparatively 
uninteresting. No less than three theories as to 
the manner of the introduction of Christianity 
into Britain have been held and advocated by emi- 
nent scholars. There is strong enough evidence 
to make the learned Bishop of Lincoln, Christo- 
pher Wordsworth, declare that it is probable that 
St. Paul himself preached the Gospel in Britain 
about A. D. 64. (Wordsworth's ^^Introduction to 
Pastoral Epistles.") 

The most favored tradition in England was 
that which assigned the preaching of Christ and 
the founding of Glastonbury Abbey to Joseph of 
Arimathea. Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 5 

Parker (see Here's ^^Eighteen Centuries'' etc., 
p, 10) incidentally ajDpeal to this as received 
tradition. The English Bishops at the Council 
of Basle, A. D. 1439, successfully claimed prec- 
edence on account of it. 

The Eoman Catholic historian, Baronius 
(1557), has a curious marginal gloss, in which it 
is recorded that Joseph of Arimathea went to 
Britain by way of Gaul and founded the Church 
there, and that the authority for this statement 
is a manuscript in the Vatican library. 

There is very strong evidence for the opinion 
that the Claudia, wife of Pudens, mentioned by 
St. Paul (II Tim. 4), is the same Claudia men- 
tioned by the Roman poet Martial, and w^as a 
British princess, educated in the Christian Faith 
by Timothy at Eome (see E. H. Cole, ^'The An- 
glican Church"). 

It is sufficient for our purpose to supj)ose that 
Christianitv came into Britain throusrh the 
Church in Gaul somewhere towards the end of the 
first century. Tertullian mentions the fact before 
the end of the second century, and we know that 
some of the victims of the Diocletian persecution, 
St. Alban for example, were members of the 
British Church. The names of British Bishops 
appear in the records of the Council of xlrles 
(A. D. 340), Sardica (A. D. 350), and Eimini 



6 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

(A. D. 352), at the last of which we are told that 
most of them refused to be entertained at the pub- 
lic expense and provided for their own necessities. 
The British Church is specially commended by 
Athanasius (A. D. 329) as having been loyal to 
the Creed and decisions of the first Council of 
INTicea. From the information we can glean from 
the writings of Gildas, Nennius, and Bede, and 
from statements of Italians and Saxons who were 
unfriendly, it appears that the gTowth of the 
British Church was hindered by ignorance and 
contention, and by the quick, excitable, and war- 
like character of the people. Yet the names of 
not a few very noble characters still shine out in 
her annals that have outlasted the changes of 
centuries. 

British ideas and British institutions for good 
or evil were submerged by the Saxon and Danish 
invasions. Our inheritance from them may be 
more than we can define, but it appears to be 
small. As a rule, in our social and political his- 
tory and in our language there is nothing more 
than the survival of some common custom, word, 
or phrase to prove that we were Britons. So it 
is with the British Church. The very word which 
we, as English-speaking people, use to describe 
the Christian Society — the word "Church'' — ^^ve 
probably get as an inheritance from ancient Brit- 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 7 

ain. It is a Greek word — with Greek associa- 
tions — connoting a great original conception of 
Christianity. It is characteristic of the Teutonic 
race that w^e put the emphasis upon the corporate 
relation to our Lord's Person and not upon the 
fact that we are ^^elect" or ^^called." We say 
Kuriahe — Eirh — Church — ^ ^belonging to the 
Lord/' and not Ecclesia or Eglise, ^^called out." 

THE SAXON PERIOD 
596—1066 A. D. 

In the year 596 A. D. the great and good 
Bishop Gregory L of Kome, stirred by the story 
of the flood of heathenism brought into Britain 
by the Saxon Conquest, sent the monk Augustine 
to convert the people if possible and establish the 
Church there. It is not certain that Augnistine 
ever came into personal contact with the British 
Bishops. If he did, it is not strange that cordial 
relations were not established between them. 
Augustine was narrow, supercilious and childish. 
But he did his best. He was earnest and sincere. 
He contrasts painfully and pathetically in both 
wisdom and temper with Pope Gregory. But he 
converted Ethelbert, the King of Kent, and 
during his lifetime maintained the Christian re- 
ligion in that Kingdom. Meanwhile the Keltic 
missionaries, recovering from their terror of the 
Saxons, began to make their way from Scotland 



8 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

into the Kingdom of ITorthumbria ; and there is 
no missionary record that surpasses in picturesque 
beauty and gloriou-S self-sacrifice the life of Aidan 
and Chadd, and the foundation of Lindisfarne. 

I believe that the actual statistics can be pro- 
ducedj as Mr. Gladstone says, to show that more 
real and permanent work among the Saxons was 
accomplished by the Keltic, that is, by the Britons, 
than by the Italian missionaries — but that is a 
question by itself. It makes no difference whether 
we credit the conversion of the Saxons to Augus- 
tine and his followers or to the Kelts. We need 
not fear to give Gregory and. Rome the glory. 
The Papal Dominion of Hildebrand and Inno- 
cent had not been founded in the year A. D. 596 ; 
and if all the Popes had been like Gregory, and 
if Rome had always been the Rome of Gregory, 
there would have been no rejection of the Roman 
name. 

In the year 660 A. D. the Saxon Church had 
a varying prosperity in the Seven separate King- 
doms into which England was divided. It was 
virtually unorganized and inefficient. Its leaders 
were separated by sectional jealousies, and racial 
prejudices — Briton against Roman — and individ- 
ual Bishops yielded themselves naturally to the 
whims of the Kings, to whom they happened to 
be subject. In 667 A. D., Theodore, a Greek, 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 9 

of Tarsus in Ciliciaj was consecrated Archbishop 
of Canterbury. He came to England in A. D. 
668. He went immediately to work to organize 
the Church on national lines. He found dioceses 
identical with Kingdoms. There were no settled 
Clergy and no definite territorial subdivisions. 
He reformed all this, subdivided the dioceses, and 
consecrated a Bishop for each. He refused to 
recognize old British customs as distinct from 
Roman, and prohibited their champions from 
holding ofiice in the Church. He made some 
mistakes, no doubt; but he was a great Arch- 
bishop, and to him more than to any other man 
the English Church owes its organization. Into 
every detail of worship and discipline his influ- 
ence extended. If he did not invent, he certainly 
encouraged and extended the Parochial system. 
He held two national Councils — one at Hertford 
in A. D. 673, and one at Hatfield in A. D. 680 — 
at the latter of which the decrees of the four 
General Councils were formally accepted. Thus 
the English Church became one for all the nation, 
with definite organization, at a time when, polit- 
ically and socially, the people were divided into 
several Kingdoms. And thus the State of Eng- 
land did not originally establish the Church, but 
the Church established the State. 

As Stubbs, the author of the Constitutional 



10 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

History of England^ says, ^Hhe Church in this 
respect is older that the State and formed the 
basis of the National union that followed." (See 
''Select Charters/' etc., p. 10.) 

The history of the Saxon period is little more 
than the story of the gradual growth one into the 
other of the Church and State of England. The 
Bishops were the leaders in both. English 
Churchmen became famous on the Continent. 
English Missionaries penetrated the German wil- 
derness and gave their lives for Christ. English 
Monks built up great educational institutions at 
home from which went forth masters, like Alcuin, 
to lay the foundation, in the schools of Charle- 
magne, for the University system of Europe. 
During this three hundred years the Saxon 
Church develoj)ed its own spirit, its own laws, 
customs, doctrine and ritual. It was almost en- 
tirely free from any foreign influence. One of 
its Bishops — Dunstan — on a very public occasion 
openly repudiated a Papal sentence. It was in 
a wonderful and unique way a N'ational Church, 
national in its comprehensiveness, for all English- 
men were members, as well as in its exclusiveness. 

As Stubbs says, "The development of the 
Church was free and spontaneous. The use of 
the native tongue in prayers and sermons is con- 
tinuous: the observance of native festivals also 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 11 

and the reverence paid to ISTative Saints. If the 
stimulating force of foreign intercourse was want- 
ingj the intensity with which the Church threw 
itself into the interest of the nation more than 
made up for what was lacking. The Church was 
the school and nursery of patriots — the depository 
of old traditional glories, and the refuge of the 
persecuted. Its liberty was the only form, in the 
evil days that followed, in which the traditions 
of the ancient freedom lingered, and the Church 
had its duty to educate the growing nation for 
its distant destiny as the teacher and herald of 
freedom to all the world." (Constitut. Hist, 
v. I., p. 268.) 

THE ANGLO-ROMAN PERIOD 
1066 A. D.— 1534 A. D. 

More than nine generations separate the 
Church of Theodore from the Church of Anselm, 
and to the steadily strengthening spirit of national 
love and pride, the English Church owed much 
of her independence, and her restiveness under 
foreign dictation and influence during the period 
of the Xorman rule. 

Since the Council of Hatfield in A. D. 680, 
when the simple statement of the Ecumenical 
Councils was the sufficient standard of faith for 
the Xational Church, a great change had come 
over that Church at Rome, which was rightly 



12 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCPI 

regarded as the Mother Church of Western Chris- 
tendom. Charlemagne and Leo III. together had 
launched the idea of the Holy Roman Empire in 
the year 800 A. D., and jealousy for the glory 
of this fiction had now for two centuries enlisted 
all the efforts in power and craft of Popes and 
German Emperors. More and more it seemed 
that the Christian religion would itself be lost in 
the contest between secular tyranny and Ecclesi- 
astical adroitness. As the power of the Emperors 
increased in material resources and concentration, 
the claims of the Bishops of Rome rose to meet 
and resist it. The Forged Decretals appeared in 
the ninth century. The appeal to the Donation 
of Constantino and the Sardican Canon was freely 
and recklessly made as early as the tenth century. 
And yet Rome declined. The Papacy itself was 
threatened with entire secularization and extinc- 
tion as a spiritual power. The pitiful career of 
the debauched and lawless Theophylact, as Pope 
Benedict IX., seemed to be the last act in a 
tragedy wherein the Church died, and her author- 
ity went to a half barbarous Emperor and all her 
remaining piety to the Monastic Orders. 

Erom this wreck of religion and morals, the 
Tuscan Monk, Hildebrand, rescued the Church 
on the Continent of Europe. His control of the 
Papacy began in 1048 A. D. with Leo IX., and 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 13 

lasted through the reigns of four Popes until 
1073 A. D.j when he, himself, was ready for the 
Pontifical Chair. Hildebrand was a strong, eager, 
masterful character, wholly in earnest and wholly 
consecrated to one idea. On the ruins of the holy 
league of Charlemagne and Leo he built up and 
organized a great new secular dominion, guarded 
by spiritual sanctions, coining its own money, 
subsidizing its armies, protecting spiritual in- 
terests with secular penalties — a dominion com- 
pact, complete, tremendous, and destined to bring 
the whole of Western Christendom under its in- 
fluence and control.' In A. D. 1054 the Ancient 
Greek Church was driven into schism by the 
terms of communion imposed upon it. The youth 
of the Emperor Henry encouraged the disregard 
of the Imperial authority. The enforced celibacy 
of the Clergy and the attack on the national Moz- 
arabic liturgy of Spain, were parts of the great 
design, which gave the Papacy the unity of or- 
ganization and the military precision, that sent 
legates plenipotentiary to every Court and held 
them absolutely subject to the authority at Rome. 
These were the conditions imder which Wil- 
liam the I^orman made his invasion into England, 
under the form of law and with the expressed 



^ See PhiUimore, International Law, p. 53. 



14 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

sanction of the Pope. The Norman Conquest 
extended both to Church and State. Every 
Saxon Bishopj with one exception, was deposed 
and his See given to a foreigner. The free Saxon 
Church of England became in name and govern- 
ment, not a sister as aforetime, but a subject to 
the Roman See. The history of the Anglo- 
ISTorman or Anglo-Eoman Church corresponds 
almost precisely with the history of the decline 
and the revival of national feeling. As long as 
the jSTormans held Saxons in slavery and made 
the French language the language of the Court, 
and regarded England only as a temporary abiding 
place, so long did the Church of England appear 
to be a willing vassal of the Papacy. The record 
becomes confused with the conflicts of Roman 
Archbishops and Norman Sovereigns; and, as in 
the time of Theodore, the national idea found 
lodgment in the minds of Churchmen before it 
was realized by the Kings. King John, for ex- 
ample, was a foreigner, an alien, who was ready 
to surrender his cro^vn and throne to an Italian 
Potentate; but Stephen Langton, Archbishop 
though he was, with the Papal Pallium — Stephen 
Langton, with the patriotic instinct of an Eng- 
lishman who loved England and the English 
Church, was willing to defy, and did defy, a 
Papal sentence in order to wrest from John the 



HISTOKY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 15 

Magna Charta, the Charter of Ecclesiastical as 
well as of Civil liberty, and the first sentence in 
the Charter asserts the freedom of the Church 
of England. As a rule, however, we must look 
for the true national spirit in the lower Clergy 
and in the lower house of Convocation. The 
really Norman Kings and the foreign Ecclesi- 
astics, who occupied English Bishoprics, repre- 
senting the Pope, conspired to repress and sub- 
jugate the parochial Clergy. The new Mendicant 
Orders, also, independent emissaries of the Pope, 
were a continual menace to the Clergy and their 
influence. In many instances the Archbishops, 
fighting for the spiritual privileges of the Church 
against the royal tyranny, win our reluctant sym- 
pathy, even when they appeal to Rome to sustain 
them. It is hard to choose between Beckett and 
King Henry — although we know that Henry's 
victory, though temporary, was best for the 
Church in the end. We are drawn to Archbishop 
Anselm and we are disgusted with King Eufus, 
although we know that every advantage that An- 
selm gained was one more link in the chain that 
bound the Church to Rome. 

Broadly, however, as we view it now, the 
trend of affairs was plain. The Roman rule was 
tried in England and it failed. Gradually the 
Clergy of England, the Bishops as well as others. 



10 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

found that appeal to Eome was fruitless ; that her 
power was worthless ; that when she had the most 
abundant opportunity^ the Curia was helpless to 
meet^ to remedy, the evils of the time. Gradually 
the N"orman Kings became English Kings, who 
spoke the English language and looked on Eng- 
land as their home. Thus the l^ational spirit 
grew and strengthened. And with every increase 
of it the interest of the Church of England and 
the interest of the crown of England became a 
common cause against the foreigner. It was 
bound to be only a question of time when the 
ancient Saxon liberties and the ancient Saxon in- 
dependence should reassert themselves, and the 
temporary and accidental bondage should be 
ended. So Aveak and politic, so subservient to the 
royal authority had the Court of Eome become 
in the thirteenth century, that, had it not been 
galvanized by the new theological disputes of 
that period, it would have ceased to act in Eng- 
land of its own incompetency. But the awaken- 
ing hour was coming. Papal appeals and papal 
authority in England were doomed. The reign 
of Edward III. (1327-137Y) marks a distinct 
epoch. For the first time the English .language 
became recognized as the language of the Court. 
For the first time the Norman Kings became iden- 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 17 

tified, in thought, in ambition, and interest with 
their English subjects. 

In A. D. 1343 the introduction of Papal bulls 
was forbidden. In A. D. 1343 the agents of the 
Avignon Court were ignominiously driven out of 
England. In A. D. 1351 the act became a per- 
petual statute. In A. D. 1352 the purchasers of 
Papal Provisions were outlawed. In A. D. 1366 
John Wiclif began his efforts for reform, which, 
whatever their defects, were for the English Bible 
and the English language; for the national and 
ecclesiastical independence of the English people. 
In A. D. 1392 nearly sixty English Prelates, 
representatives of both the secular and regular 
Clergy, voted unanimously with Parliament for 
the Praemimire statute (^^Praemimire" — "prae- 
monere-facias,'' i. c, Cause A. B. to be fore- 
warned to appear and answer, etc.) — a statute 
that in its sweeping enactments against Rome, if 
strictly enforced, practically abolished the exercise 
by the Pope of any jurisdiction in England with- 
out the consent of the King. The Ecclesiastical 
condition of England, as regards the Papacy, 
during the thirty years at the close of the four- 
teenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century 
was almost exactly the condition occupied by the 
Church during the reign of Henry VIII. after 
the fall of Wolsey. And it is an interesting co- 



18 THE EPISCOPAL CHUKCH 

incidence that two great Masters of English 
Poetry flourished when the Church and IsTation 
were free from foreign control. Chaucer closes 
the fourteenth century and Shakespeare the reign 
of Elizabeth. 

Whatever may be said about it, the independ- 
ence claimed and secured in the fourteenth cen- 
tury was the entering wedge of that Reform 
Movement which we are wont to refer to the 
reign of Henry VIII. The statute of Praemimire 
w^as never repealed. For a long period perhaps 
it was never used. It meant at least this much: 
the standing declaration on the statute book that 
the Papal control over England was utterly in- 
compatible with the spirit, the life, the thought 
and hope of the English people. The English 
revolt from the Papacy really began in A. D. 1392. 

THE PERIOD OF REFORM AXD RECONSTRUCTION 
The sixteenth century opens upon a new Eng- 
land. The efforts of the four Councils in the 
fourteenth century to reform the Church had been 
foimd fruitless. The only Pope who wanted re- 
form, Adrian VI., had died suddenly, w^ith sig- 
nificant mystery, and carried the hope away with 
him from the Papal Chair. The Pagan renais- 
sance, with its classic intellectualism and moral 
selfishness, had begun to cultivate the spirit of 
Criticism. Martin Luther was studying at Erfurt, 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 19 

preparing for his conversion to personal religion. 
The Wars of the Eoses had destroyed the power 
of the Barons and had enlarged and increased the 
powers of the Crown. And England had a new 
King to wear the Cro^vn — a young man^ vigorous, 
active, strong, venturesome, courageous — one who 
snubbed the great Lords and trusted the people; 
who scattered the money in the royal treasury 
and kept no standing army; who outrode the 
huntsmen, outfenced the guards, and outargued 
the theologians ; one who was dignified without 
effort, and yet who disarmed and defied opposi- 
tion by the daring, reckless, jesting confidence of 
power. The Eighth Henry will fill any canvas. 
Modern historians have tried again and again to 
reduce him to the measure of some ordinary 
human mold, but they have failed egTegiously. 
Froude loved him to admiration, Stubbs declines 
to judge him. Smaller writers make themselves 
ridiculous in trying to defame him. In all the 
qualities that go to make the natural man, he 
towers head and shoulders above his roval con- 
temporaries. He had no predecessor in England 
except the Conqueror and no successor except his 
ovm Elizabeth. As late as 1519 A. D. so keen 
a critic as Erasmus does not hesitate to write of 
him as "the fine soldier, keen in counsel, strict 
in admiration, careful in the choice of his min- 



20 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

isters, anxious for the peace of the world — a King 
fit to bring back the golden age, the intelligence 
of whose country will preserve the memory of his 
virtues, and scholars mil tell how a King once 
reigned there who in his own person revived the 
virtues of the ancient heroes." (Letters of Eras- 
mus. ) 

But his great qualities were the qualities of 
the natural man — and he showed all the strength 
and all the weakness of Esau's character. His 
dominant passion was power — his chief character- 
istic was inflexible resolution and self-will; his 
mortal sin was not lust but pride. He was a 
lion, Sir Thomas Moore said, ^Svhose ferocity 
would increase with the awakening consciousness 
of his power." 

What did the English Church owe to Henry 
in its effort to reform? Well, Henry found the 
laws on the statute book which for more than an 
hundred years had repudiated the Papal inter- 
ference in English affairs and declared the emis- 
saries of the Pope to be outlaws and felons. He 
found the people and the Clergy too, ready to 
revolt against Rome. He found the records of 
the nation even in Saxon times upholding the 
royal power against all foreign interference. He 
found the ablest men in England, both laymen 
and ecclesiastics, full of the new learning and 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 21 

clamoring for reform. He had heard his own 
intimate friend, the great Dean Colet, preach 
again and again, deploring the abuses of the time. 
Evidently with such conditions and such a King, 
all that was needed was a spark to light the fire 
to hurl the Church and country into revolution. 
The wonder is, and Henry's claim to admiration 
is, that the revolution, when it came, was so well 
controlled. 

The immediate cause of Henry's quarrel with 
the Pope was the question of the annulment of 
his marriage was Katharine. Henry never asked 
for a divorce. He maintained that the marriage 
from the beginning had been invalid. The sub- 
ject need not detain us long. The fact that a 
King, who had grown tired of his wife, six years 
older than himself, after sixteeen vears of wed- 
lock, demanded a release from the contract, on 
the ground that the marriage had been at the out- 
set a direct violation of the Church's law, var- 
nished over by a Pope's decree — this is not very 
wonderful or unusual. The subsequent proceed- 
ings are less creditable if anything to the Pope 
than to Henry. Clement refused to grant the 
divorce, not on any religious or moral ground, but 
for fear of Katharine's nephew, Charles, Emperor 
of Germany. It was an evil and imjust thing, 
so to humble a faithful wife and Queen — divorces 



22 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

are always evil things ; but when we come to give 
our verdict we shall have to nail our sentence at 
the door of that Eoman Court which first began 
to trifle with the Church's law that guarded the 
marriage bond. 

Henry believed in himself, and in the affec- 
tions of his people — that new middle class that 
made his throne secure. The lion more and more 
realized, as he was forced to test his power. 
Henry was a playful tyrant. His moral scrupu- 
losity is striking. He was ever singularly respect- 
ful to the law. 'No act of his can be named that 
did not at least have the form of precedent. It 
was the law of praemunire that he used to ruin 
Wolsey and to frighten the reluctant members of 
Convocation and Parliament to submission. It 
was by legal precedents that the monasteries were 
dissolved. It was by law that his wives were put 
away or condemned to death. It was by ancient 
statute that the title of Supreme Head of the 
Church was defended and sustained. Every arti- 
cle of the Catholic Faith was jealously maintained, 
and the very Act that repudiated the Pope's 
jurisdiction recited the precedents of the councils 
of the Catholic Church. No step was taken in 
spiritual matters without the formal consent of 
Convocation, the Church's council. And it ought 
to be said, that, while the Emperor of Germany 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 23 

was busy issuing doctrinal statements and exploit- 
ing his theological learning, Henry left doctrine 
to his Bishops, only taking care that it was not 
in conflict with the Roman faith. 

For Henry never for one moment thought that 
he was less a son of Rome in his spiritual faith and 
hope, because he happened to rebel against Papal 
jurisdiction. There had been Kings of France 
and Germany, and of England too, who had done 
as much as he did, e.g., Frederick II. and Philip 
IV. He had no sympathy with Lutheranism. 
He wanted no new system of religion. He did 
not even oppose or deny the spiritual authority 
of the Pope. He wanted to have his own way 
in his own kingdom, and he got what he wanted. 
He invented an impossible regime, that has been 
aptly called ^Topery without a Pope.'' Indirectly, 
however, and unwittingly, he paved the way for 
the reformation that succeeded. 

Stubbs' characterization of Henry is the best 
that has yet been written. He says, ^^I do not 
believe him to have been a monster of lust and 
blood as so many Roman Catholic writers regard 
him. He was not abnormally profligate; in this 
region of morality he was not better perhaps than 
Charles V., but he was much better than Francis I. 
and Philip II. and Henry IV. I seem to see in 
him a grand, gross figure, very far removed from 



24 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

ordinary human sympathies; self-engrossed, self- 
confident, self-willed, nnscrupulous in act, violent 
and crafty, justifying to himself by his belief in 
himself, both unscrupulousness, violence and craft. 
And with all this, as needs must have been, a very 
unhappy man, wretched in his family, wretched 
in his loneliness — that awful loneliness in which 
a King lives, and which the worst as well as the 
best of despots realize. Have I drawn the outline 
of a monster ? Well, perhaps ; but not the popular 
notion of this particular portent : A strong, high- 
spirited, ruthless, disappointed, solitary creature — 
a thing to hate, or to pity, or to smile at, or to 
shudder at, or to wonder at, but not to judge." 
(Lectures, p. 81.) 

What then did Henry VIII. do for the Church 
of England? 

Well, he threw the Church on herself, com- 
pelled her to realize her independence, her auton- 
omy. He emphasized and accentuated the na- 
tional idea. He made it possible for English 
Bishops and laymen to undertake great changes 
in doctrinal and ritual matters without fearing 
or regarding foreign approval or disapproval. 
Above all, in a time of vast upheavals — of war 
and bloodshed, of deadly struggles and savage 
riots — Henry VIII. had the judgment, the tact, 
the popularity and power with his subjects to hold 



PIISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 25 

in check partisan and fanatical movements, and 
during fifteen years of religious unrest and 
change, to keep the institutions of the Church and 
the Church itself from ruin. As Cardinal Man- 
ning once said, and historical facts do not change 
with the change of religion, ^^The Crown and 
Church of England, with a steady opposition, re- 
sisted the entrance and encroachment of the sec- 
ularized ecclesiastical power of the Pope in Eng- 
land. The last rejection of it was no more than 
a successful effort after many a failure in struggles 
of like kind. And it was an act taken by men 
who were sound, according to Roman doctrines, 
on all other points." ^ 

When Henry VIII. died, in 1546, the net 
results of the twelve years movement were : 

(1) The Papal Power in England was de- 
stroyed and the Church of England was declared 
competent to administer her own affairs. The 
Headship of the King was accepted with the quali- 
ijhig phrase, ^^So far as the law of Christ will 
allow'' ; 

(2) The continuity of the Episcopate was kept 
without a break; 

(3) The Bible was printed in English and 
commanded to be read in all the churches ; 



^ Manning', Unity of the Church, p. 296. 



2G THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

(4) The Creed^ Lord's Prayer, and Ten Com- 
mandments were printed in English, and recited 
slowly in Church so that the people could mem- 
orize them, and school-masters had to teach them 
to the children ; 

(5) Superstitious image-worship and pilgrim- 
ages were forbidden. And all this was prefaced 
by the words of the Statute, ^Sve do not intend 
to decline or vary from the Catholic Faith of 
Christendom." 

Thus it happened that the first blow for free- 
dom was struck in the reign of Henry, but it was 
more than an hundred years before the readjust- 
ment of her doctrinal and ritual system to the 
changed conditions of her life was completed. 
The history of that readjustment is the history 
of constitutional liberty; it is marked by ebbs 
and flows, by foreign influence and dissension, by 
political complications, by heroisms and martyr- 
doms, but the result was worth it all. After the 
reign of Edward had given the Prayer Book and 
had taught the dangerous tendency of foreign in- 
fluence towards fanatical disintegration, and after 
the brief and morbid reaction under Mary had 
burnt the hatred of Rome and Roman methods 
into the hearts of the people, it would have seemed 
that the wise moderation of Elizabeth's policy 
would have settled the disputes forever. 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 27 

Her accession was marked immediately by 
the public assertion of the historic continuity 
from the past of the Church of the English peo- 
ple from the time of Joseph of Arimathea — ^by 
the emphatic definition of the Church's spiritual 
character as distinct from state control, and by the 
endorsement of that reform in doctrine and prac- 
tice, for which the Roman Church herself was 
striving and which the people at large had come 
to understand and approve. Of 9,000 Clergy in 
England at her accession only 189 refused to con- 
form to the revised system of worship. For 
eleven years there was peace and harmony and 
progTess. 

Robert Parsons, the celebrated Jesuit (1593) 
makes one of his characters say, ^^I do well re- 
member the first dozen years of her Highness' 
reign: how happy, how pleasant, how quiet they 
were, with all manner of comfort and consolation. 
There w^as no mention then of factions in relig- 
ion; neither was any man much noted or rejected 
for that cause, so otherwise his conversation was 
civil and courteous. ISTo suspicion of treason, no 
talk of bloodshed, no complaint of troubles, mis- 
eries, or vexations. All was peace, all was love, 
all was joy, all w^as delight." 

There was, according to William Watson, the 
Roman Catholic priest (1602), one of her bitter- 



28 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

est enemies, "'No talk of treasons or conspiracies, 
no jealousies nor suspicions, no envy nor supplan- 
tations, no fear of. murdering, nor massacring, no 
question of conscience or religion. But all lived 
in great content and right good fellowship was 
amongst them/' (Ingram ^^England and Rome," 
p. 250.) 

That peace was broken by the Pope's Bull, 
Pius v., 1570, which excommunicated the Queen, 
declared the throne vacant, absolved her subjects 
from all allegiance, duty and obedience, and in- 
cited them to rebellion, and plunged the land into 
a storm of plots, conspiracies, homicides, sacrilege, 
and assassination, which made Pope Urban VIII. 
himself declare in A. D. 1641 that ^^he bewailed 
with ^tears of blood' the conduct of his predeces- 
sors of the sixteenth century towards England 
and her people." 

The author of all religious discord in England 
was foreign influence. The disciples of Calvin 
were not slow to follow the subjects of Pope Pius 
into dissent and rebellion. Puritanism, at first 
a distinctly personal following of Calvin and 
Zwinglius, was quite as much of a foreign move- 
ment as the Italian influences operating from 
Rome. Both were attacks upon the national char- 
acter and constitution of the Church. Both at- 
tempted with varying success to destroy the na- 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 29 

tional idea, that had been the safegaiard and glory 
of religion in England since the time of Theodore. 

The original pnritanism practically died out in 
Elizabeth's reign. Cartwright, the founder of 
English Presbyterianism, and Browne, the founder 
of Congregationalism, returned to and died in the 
Communion of the English Church. 

The new Puritanism of the seventeenth cen- 
tury w^as first of all a political movement in which 
good men and loyal Churchmen, fighting for 
ancient liberties, found themselves swept away by 
the champions of a religious fanaticism, whose 
first principle of faith contradicted the very idea 
of constitutional liberty. Whatever were the 
faults of Laud, and he certainly was human, there 
is no doubt, as Professor Eawson Gardiner savs 
(History of England, v. IL, p. 64), that his 
theological position was essentially that of Hooker, 
and Cranmer, and there is no doubt that the old 
man laid dovni his life in protest and defiance 
against a conception of religion that would have 
chained the English Church forever under the 
iron yoke of Calvinism — a conception of religion, 
which we universally repudiate to-day as contra- 
dictory of the truth, the genuineness, the bright- 
ness of the English character. The "streak of 
intellectual vulgarity,'^ as Matthew Arnold calls 
it, which rims through Macaulay's History has 



30 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

utterly misrepresented the character and purpose 
and life of William Laud. 

Into the political movements of the reigns of 
James and Charles I. and Cromwell we need not 
enter. The Church of England came out of the 
furnace of affliction with her continuity unbroken 
and her faith defined and her spirit chastened 
and purified. The character of the Church in the 
early years of Queen Anne's reign vindicated all 
her previous history. The learning of her great 
divines and the frequency and dignity of her 
services, the breadth and freshness and freedom 
of her outward life, her missionary zeal, and her 
works of charity and education, gained for her 
the honor and veneration of Christians of every 
name. 

In A. D. 1717, DuPin, Head of the Theological 
College of the Sorbonne, and other leaders of the 
Church of France, whose national spirit had 
chafed and fretted under the Papal Rule for at 
least six hundred years, and who had talked of 
reformation before it was begun in England, des- 
pairing of any self-respecting alliance with Rome, 
made overtures for union with the English Church 
on the common ground of loyalty to the Catholic 
faith and constitution, with reservation of na- 
tional independence. (See Hore ^^Eighteen Cen- 
turies," etc., p. 493.) So, also, in 1706 A. D. 



HISTORY OF THE CHUPxCH OF ENGLAND 31 

Frederick I. of Prussia, with the advice and 
assistance of many of the ablest men in his King- 
dom, both Clergymen and laymen, among whom 
Leibnitz was conspicuous, formally proposed union 
between German Protestants and the Church of 
England, practically on the ground proposed in 
the so-called Quadrilateral of A. D. 1886. The 
Germans expressed their willingTiess to receive 
the Episcopate. The Prayer Book was trans- 
lated into the German language; and much en- 
thusiasm was manifested in England over this 
great step towards the reunion of Christendom. 
Political complications, however, and the deaths 
of the prominent leaders prevented either of these 
movements from producing any practical results. 
Yet the facts may be taken as clear evidence of 
the true insight of DeMaistre's prophecy, that if 
reunion shall ever be accomplished, it will be 
through the mediation of the Church of England. 
The eighteenth century proved to be, in some 
respects worse for the Church than any she had 
before lived through. That very national idea, 
which had been her glory from the time of 
Theodore, became, in the union of Church and 
State under new conditions, a hindrance and men- 
ace to her life. When the Hanoverian Kings, 
who like the early Norman Kings could not even 
speak English, found that they could not coerce 



32 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

Churchmen into Erastianism, they took away 
freedom of speech and suppressed Convocation, 
the Church's Council, for over one hundred years. 
This was the period of triumphant infidelity, 
w^hich created the reason for, and in its reaction, 
the inspiration of Methodism. Yet the Church 
Avas capable without foreign influence or aid of 
renewal and reform within herself. The Evan- 
gelical revival of A. D. 1780 and the Oxford 
Movement (A. D. 1833) have multiplied her 
activities and proved her power. Her very trials 
and her recovery from them have demonstrated 
under God her spiritual claims. Moreover she 
has demonstrated that she is a ^ ^fruit-tree yielding 
fruit, w^hose seed is in itself" (Gen. 1:11): for 
in A. D. 1784 Samuel Seabury was consecrated 
the first Bishop for the Church in the United 
States of America, and in the course of one hun- 
dred and thirty years this American daughter has 
grown from a mere handful to more than one 
million communicants and quite three million 
adherents. 

So the Church of England has seen the great 
principles which she stood for, principles which 
have been too often obscured and rendered in- 
effectual by her misfortune of state connection, 
these principles she has seen take root and flourish 
in a new land, among a new people, under changed 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 33 

conditions, and she has not failed to learn a lesson 
from it. It was only a few years ago that the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, asserting authority 
which had been unused for centuries, at once and 
forever repudiated, on behalf of his Order, sec- 
ular control, by either Crow^n or Court, over the 
discharge of his spiritual office, and set at rest 
forever the question as to the meaning of the 
Sovereign's relation to the English Church. The 
Church of England has learned something from 
this American daughter. To-day they stand to- 
gether — in mutual love and sympathy — in the 
bonds of mutual service, holding forth to English- 
speaking Christians of every name the ideal of 
our Saxon forefathers; the ideal which is conse- 
crated to us all by the memories and traditions 
of the greatest of our race ; the ideal which shines 
dimly and imperfectly perhaps through the mist 
of so many tears, so much dissension: and, God 
help us, so much disimion among English-speaking 
Christians : and yet, the ideal which, in its rough 
outline and fimdamental principles, is still set 
forth in that Church, which preserves the same 
faith, the same sacraments, the same ministry, 
the same worship, which Theodore maintained at 
Hatfield, A. D. 680, and Stephen Langton de- 
fended at Eunnvmede, A. D. 1215. She main- 
tains the constitutional system of free Church 



34 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

Government, secured primarily in the succession 
of her Bishops, as in the days of Cyprian, A. D. 
258, and Athanasius, A. D. 325, and Gregory the 
Great, A. D. 596. 

She stands to-day a worthy witness to the 
truths for which she has contended. She retains 
a foremost place in the Eeformed Christian w^orld. 
Her learning has not diminished, and her resolute 
hopefulness has not declined. Her missionary 
activities have been enlarged. Her practical 
charities are multiplied. Her reverence for the 
great past has not checked her outlook for the 
gTeater future. She has kept abreast of liberty 
and progress and yet has never for a moment 
hesitated in her hold on the Catholic faith. The 
principles for which she stands and has stood are 
still the permanent safeguards of our Christian 
civilization. She holds before men the Church 
idea, that is the Social idea, the idea of Plato, 
Aristotle, and St. Paul, as the only satisfaction 
of the longing for universal brotherhood and the 
only hope of Christ's conquest of the world. She 
believes in authority as not inconsistent with true 
freedom, in liberty without license, and law with- 
out despotism. She exhorts her people to the 
practical duties of the Christian life in a spirit 
of confidence, sustained and fostered by sacra- 
mental and solemn services, and not by emphasis 



HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 35 

put upon feeling at the expense of conscience. 
She trusts more to sober training in religion than 
to passionate upheavals. She comes to men, not 
to court popularity by adapting herseK to their 
natural instincts and prejudices, but to reform 
and uplift them, and to give them something 
above the measure of their ordinary taste and 
temperament, and to furnish them with an ideal 
to follow. She believes in the solemn splendor 
of worship, the chaste dignity of her liturgy, the 
inspiration of all true art, and the culture of all 
true education. Above all she makes little of the 
metaphysical doctrinal definitions that have vexed 
and divided Christendom during the past three 
hundred years, believing that Christianity is first 
of all a life, an institution, and that the life is 
more than meat and the body is more than raiment. 
The maintenance of these principles was worth 
the sufferings of Parker and the martyrdom of 
Laud. They were great enough to demand and 
deserve the patient waiting of our American fore- 
fathers — so great and fruitful, that in spite of 
misconception and distrust, they have taken root 
in this new land, and, freed from the restraint 
of State connection and Royal interference, they 
have become, even to those who at first revolted 
from them, a great and growing factor in our 
permanent national life. 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 

(1) Its History 

(2) The Reformation which produced it 

(3) The needs which it supplied 




THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 

HE Book of Common Prayer is, in one 
aspect of it, the creation of the dawn- 
ing democracy of the English-speak- 
ing people. It takes rank with King 
James' version of the Bible as one of the two 
noblest achievements of English literature. It 
enshrines the faith, the hope, the worship which 
five generations of Englishmen — through one hun- 
dred and twenty-five stormy years — planned and 
wrought and sacrificed to establish, as the An- 
glican interpretation of Christianity. For these 
reasons, among others, the Prayer Book is the 
common inheritance, and should be the pride, of 
all English-speaking Christians — as it is certainly 
a literary and religious memorial of such surpass- 
ing interest and value that no true culture can af- 
ford to neglect it. To be ignorant of the history and 
contents of the Book of Common Prayer is hardly 
less barbarous than to be unfamiliar with the Eng- 
lish Bible and the works of Shakespeare. 

And, therefore, a body of literature has been 
created as to the sources and meaning and pur- 
pose of the Prayer Book, unsurpassed for learning 



40 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

and eloquencej by great writers — lawyers, states- 
men, and ecclesiastics — and, to quote Dr. J. H. 
Benton's admirable monograph,^ ^^those who know 
it best love it best.'' ^^It has profoundly influ- 
enced not only the moral, but the intellectual, so- 
cial, and political life of England and of the 
world." ^^It has affected diplomacy and states- 
manship. It has gone wherever the English lan- 
guage has gone and has been translated also into 
nearly all the written languages of the world. Its 
history is part of the warp and woof of the history 
of the English people and nation, which no one 
can understand who does not know its story." It 
has been twice proscribed by law, all copies of it 
ordered to be destroyed and its use in public or 
private devotions made a crime; but it has, with 
few substantial alterations, remained unchanged 
in its original English form for three hundred 
and sixty years. 

The Christian Church has always used a 
liturgy. St. Luke describes the first Christians 
as continuing in "the prayers," and the New Tes- 
tament abounds in references to the participation 
of the people in the forms of public worship, 
many of which they inherited from the Jewish 
Church. 



^ The Boole of Common Prayer. J. H. Benton, LL.D. 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 41 

From the beginning the central service was 
the service of the Holy Communion^ known as 
the Liturgy Proper, and the daily offices were 
based on that. 

The liturgies of Christendom may be grouped 
under four heads, viz. : the Liturgy of St. James, 
the Liturgy of St. Mark, the Liturgy of St. Peter, 
and the Liturgy of St. John — all of which are still 
in use in the historic churches of the world — and 
all of them are of Eastern origin, because, as you 
know, Christianity is an Eastern religion and the 
Greek language was its original vehicle for in- 
tellectual and devotional expression. The Roman 
Church, using the Latin language, is a later devel- 
opment. The Roman Christians of the first cen- 
tury spoke Greek, and the early Popes were not 
Italians but Greeks. The very name ^Tope'' is 
a Greek word — a common title to this day given 
to every pastor in the Eastern Church. (Stanley.)'' 

A combination of circumstances, which I shall 
not take the time to explain in this lecture, made 
the Mediaeval Church in the West — certainly from 
A. D. 1054 to A. D. 1518 — a close corporation, 
in which the laity had little part, except to obey 
orders and submit. Worship for the layman was 
a formal attendance upon a ceremonial conducted 



- See Dr. Hart's admirable volume, The Book of Common 
Prayer. 



42 THE EPISCOPAL CHUKCH 

by the priests, in their own way and in a language 
virtually unknown to any but themselves. As for 
the daily prayers, the clergy had an entire mon- 
opoly of them, and not all the clergy — only the 
regulars, or members of religious orders — observed 
them faithfully. The comparative isolation of 
England gave to its Church an unique independ- 
ence of development, and even in the period of 
the Pope's most autocratic supremacy, the Ecclesia 
Anglicana — i.e., the English Church — was recog- 
nized in the public law as an independent institu- 
tion. In 1085 A. D. a great Bishop of Salisbury 
put forth a service book peculiarly English and 
un-Eoman, known as the book of Sarum, but of 
course, it was not in English, because at that time 
the English language had not reached a literary 
form. The Magna Charia, our charter of liberty, 
in 1215, which was wrung from King John, and 
in open defiance of the Pope, begins with the de- 
mand that the Church of England shall have her 
rights entire and her liberties uninjured. All 
through the early history of the Anglo-Saxon 
Church there were sporadic attempts to give the 
people translations of the Bible in the common 
tongue and to popularize the service of the Church 
by putting it into a language ^^understanded of 
the people.'' These service books were called 
^Trymers," and have been described as "The Lay 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 43 

Folks Prayer Books." They contained some of 
the psabns and a litany, but none of the priests' 
or Bishops' Offices, nor any of the directions for 
the conduct of worship, and they were all in manu- 
script, because there was no printed book in Eng- 
land until A. D. 1474. 

The last quarter of the fifteenth century is one 
of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It 
witnessed the revival of Greek learning, and 
through Greek learning, the return to the study of 
the primitive truth of Christianity. So it was 
said, when Erasmus' first edition of the IsTew Tes- 
tament was published in 1516, ^^Greece rose from 
the dead with the iSTew Testament in her right 
hand." It witnessed the invention of printing, 
the use of the mariner's compass, the discovery of 
America, and, we may say, the birth of Martin 
Luther. The whole Western world waked up and 
began a revolution, of which the religious move- 
ment, called the Reformation, was one manifesta- 
tion. Council after council had met in the fif- 
teenth century to reform ecclesiastical abuses, but 
all of them were dominated and strangled by 
Eome. Then in 1517 Luther issued his challenge. 
In 1520 he was excommunicated by the Pope, and 
one of his fiercest enemies was the young and 
popular King of England, Henry VIIL It 
looked at first as if Henry would use his extraor- 



44: THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

dinary popularity and power to stamp out the 
new movement in England, for he was a special 
friend of Eome. The PojDe had over-ridden the 
Church's w^ritten law and given Henry a special 
dispensation to marry his brother's widow. He 
had also conferred a new^ title upon Henry and 
proclaimed him as ^^Defender of the Faith." 

It was an astounding event, therefore, to the 
men of that time, when this ^^Pet of the Papacy" 
resented the new Pope's refusal to permit him to 
put away his w^ife, as he said, *^ ^because of con- 
scientious scruples," and encouraged the Reforma- 
tion movement in England, in order to spite the 
Pope. Plenry played a political game for his own 
personal ends, but to the last his religious con- 
victions were hostile to the Reformation. During 
the later years of his reign he tried to check the 
movement, but it was too late. The independence 
of the Church of England had become an accom- 
plished fact. The Bible had been given to the 
people in English, and the Litany and other parts 
of the public service, and there was a widespread 
and earnest demand for further reformation. 

Henry died January 28, 1547, and his son 
succeeded him as Edward VI. 

In December of that year a parliamentary 
Act was passed authorizing the administration of 
the Holy Communion in both kinds, and a ser- 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 45 

vice book of the Holy Commiiniou in the Eng- 
lish language was issued in March, 1548. Arch- 
bishop Cranmer and ^^other discreet Bishops and 
Divines" were set to work, by order of the king, 
to prepare a Book of Common Prayer, and this 
book, having been debated and adopted in the 
Church Convocation and afterwards in Parliament 
after long discussion, was set forth and established 
for common use on January 21, 1549. 

There can be no doubt that this book — known 
as the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. — repre- 
sented and expressed the convictions of the vast 
majority of clergy and people of the Church of 
England. But it was too consen-ative for the ex- 
treme reformers, who had meantime been rein- 
forced by immigrants from the Protestant sections 
of Continental Europe, and so in 1552 a revised 
Prayer Book was set forth by authority, which 
included the Ordinal, that is, the "form and man- 
ner of making and consecrating Archbishops, 
Bishops, Priests, and Deacons," which had existed 
before, but was made part of the Prayer Book at 
this time. This second Prayer Book of Edward 
VI. changed the sentence to be used in the adminis- 
tration of the Communion from "The Body of 
our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee 
preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life," 
to "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ 



46 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

died for thee and feed on Him in thy heart by 
faith with thanksgiving"; and also inserted the 
Black Rubric, as it was called, which explained 
that the kneeling posture at the Communion did 
not imply worship of the physical elements. The 
worst defect of this second Prayer Book was the 
omission of the Office for the Anointing of the 
Sick, which was part of the First Prayer Book 
and was a legitimate return to the practice of the 
early Church, as contrasted with the custom of 
Extreme Unction, which was not for the purpose 
of restoring men to health, but of preparing them 
for death. I cannot but believe that we would 
have been saved from some modern follies of faith- 
healing if this old office had been retained in our 
Prayer Book. 

Queen Mary succeeded Edward VI. and for five 
years the Prayer Book was proscribed and every 
effort was made to stamp out the reform movement. 
But the flames of the three hundred fires that 
burned Englishmen for their faith only served to 
refine and purify English Churchmanship and 
clear men's minds as to the essential and everlast- 
ing issues. 

When Elizabeth succeeded Mary in the autumn 
of 1558, the Praver Book and the Reformation 
were at once restored, and of 9,400 clergymen in 
England only about 189 refused to conform. The 



THE BOOK OF C0M3I0N PRAYER 47 

methods of Cardinal Pole and Queen Mary had 
cured the English people forever of any love for 
the Italian ecclesiastical dominion. 

The Prayer Book set forth under Elizabeth 
was substantially the second Book of Edward VI. 
with the omission of the Black Rubric and the 
addition of the form of administration in the first 
Book, giving us the double sentence which we use 
to-day. And this Book was the common devo- 
tional handbook of Englishmen during that long 
reign of forty-five years. 

Unfortunately two classes of obstructionists 
had arisen. First, the Puritans, and second, the 
Sectarians or Dissenters. The first dissenters 
were the Eoman Catholics, who had used the 
Prayer Book and enjoyed it with all its offices 
for baptism, burial, and Holy Communion for 
eleven years, but were forced by the Pope's excom- 
munication of Elizabeth (A. D. 1569) to form 
themselves into a separate sect. Then some of the 
Puritans organized under a Presbyterian polity, 
and the Independents or Congregationalists fol- 
lowed their example. The great majority of the 
Puritans remained in the Church, conforming 
with more or less fidelity to the order of service, 
but desiring what we would call a ^^converted 
membership" and a nearer approach to the Cal- 
vinistic conception of religion. It was in defer- 



48 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

ence to the Puritan demands for change that King 
James I. held a conference with men of all parties 
at Hampton Conrt^ 1604; but the discussion for 
the most part was on technical and trivial issues 
and the Prayer Book was unchanged, except by 
the addition of the questions on the Sacraments 
in the Catechism. One great result of the confer- 
ence, however, was that an order Avas issued by 
the King for the translation of the Bible from the 
original tongues, and this gave us the version 
of 1611. 

King James died in 1625 and was succeeded 
by his son Charles I. during whose troublous reign 
the Puritans and Presbyterians succeeded in over- 
throwing the Church of England. Archbishop 
Laud and King Charles were both beheaded, and 
on January 3, 1645, the Book of Common Prayer 
was proscribed by Act of Parliament, all copies 
of it were ordered to be burnt, and the use of it, 
in public or in private, in the Church or at family 
prayers, was punished by fine and imprisonment. 
A so-called directory was substituted for it, in 
which, among other things, it was ordered that 
when persons died their bodies should be buried 
without any ceremony whatever, Avithout either 
prayer or music. 

For sixteen years this gloomy and terrible re- 
ligion prevailed, and the clergy and laity, who had 



THE BOOK OF CO>mOX PRAYER 49 

learned to love the Prayer Book and its services, 
were hunted and persecuted. How they learned 
the Book by heart and kept up the prayers is de- 
lightfully told by Isaak Walton in his life of 
Bishop Sanderson. 

Charles II. came to the throne in 1660, and 
immediately the Prayer Book was restored to use. 
The next year, at the Savoy Conference, the Puri- 
tans and the leaders of the Church had their final 
discussion as to the changes in the Prayer Book 
that were deemed absolutely necessary by the non- 
conformists ; but it was found that the system of the 
Church and that of the Puritans were so irrecon- 
cilable that one communion could not hold them 
both. A thorough review of the Prayer Book was 
made at this time ; it was carefully edited ; in the 
prayer for the Church in the Communion Office, 
as Dr. Hart says, an explicit oblation and a com- 
memoration of the departed were inserted; the 
Black Rubric was restored with an important 
change in its phraseology — ^^corporal'^ being sub- 
stituted for ^^real and essential" in the description 
of the Presence — a few concessions to the Puritans, 
such as giving the Epistles and Gospels in the last 
translation, were made. The other changes were 
merely editorial, and the Prayer Book of 1662 
has been the standard for two hundred and fifty 
years. 



50 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

In order to understand the situation more 
clearly I shall mention a few of the other changes 
desired by the Puritans. They made three pre- 
liminary declarations, viz:' 

(1) They agreed to the Episcopal government 
of the Church, provided it was not too autocratic ; 

(2) They strongly asserted the necessity of a 
written Liturgy for public worship ; 

(3) They objected to all ceremonies because 
they were not acceptable to the Continental Protes- 
tants. 

As to the Prayer Book they objected : 

(1) To the whole practice of responsive wor- 
ship, whether in prayers or chants or litanies, and 
to the recitation of the Confession by the people 
or any other prayer. They held that one long 
prayer by the minister was more edifying, and 
that "amen" said by the people was enough — the 
minister being their spokesman or mouth-piece. 
They opposed the idea of a Common Prayer in 
which the laity took part. They objected to the 
delivery of the elements to the people one by one. 

(2) They objected to the sign of the cross, the 
use of the ring and the surplice, and all such ritual 
accessories. 

(3) They objected to the liberality of the 



^See Cardwell's Conferences, pp. 303-335. 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 51 

Prayer Book in praying for ''all who travel" ; in 
saying that all baptized infants dying before Con- 
firmation and Communion are undoubtedly saved ; 
calling all baptized children ^^regenerate" ; to the 
generalities of the Confession which ought to go 
more into particulars ; to the prayer in the Burial 
Office that ^Vhen we depart this life, we may rest 
in Him, as our hope is this our brother doth" ; 
and to the use of the word ^^Sunday" instead of 
Lord's Day. 

(4) They objected to Sponsors in Baptism on 
the ground that any profession of faith on the part 
of the child, even through its parents or guardians, 
might encourage the heresy of the Anabaptists, who 
insisted on faith before Baptism. 

The replies of the Bishops to these objections 
were at considerable length, and the substance was : 

(1) We do not propose to surrender our whole 
liturgical inheritance from the Catholic Church 
of history, nor the immemorial traditions of Cath- 
olic usage, in order to please the new, individual 
tastes and preferences of a certain extreme party 
of people in this age. 

(2) If any phrase or use of custom authorized 
in the Prayer Book can be shoAvn to be contrary 
to Holy Scripture or the teaching of the primitive 
Church, we shall gladly change it, but not other- 
wise. 



52 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

The first use of the Prayer Book within the 
present limits of the United States appears to have 
been in 1579, when the chaplain of Sir Francis 
Drake read prayers at the time of a landing on the 
Pacific Coast near San Francisco, and a Prayer 
Book Cross has been erected to mark the spot. The 
first permanent settlement of English Churchmen 
was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, thirteen 
years before the Puritans landed on Plymouth 
Rock. The services of the Prayer Book were 
regularly used at Jamestown at the beginning, and 
have been continuous ever since, although for 177 
years the colonists had no Bishops to minister to 
them, and the offices for ordination and confirma- 
tion were practically unknown. It is amazing, 
when we think of it, that such a maimed and head- 
less Church could ever have survived, and yet it 
was the Prayer Book — the sane and noble and 
lofty spiritual idealism of the Prayer Book — 
which held the allegiance and moulded the char- 
acter of the majority of those great Americans 
who accomplished the Revolution and founded 
the Republic. Two-thirds of the signers of the 
Declaration of Independence, and quite two-thirds 
of the men who adopted the Constitution, had been 
brought up in the use of the Book of Common 
Prayer. 

As soon as the Revolution had been accom- 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 53 

plished Churchmen met together for complete or- 
ganization. The people of Connecticut elected 
Samuel Seabury Bishop and sent him across the 
sea to be consecrated ; and he, finding that the legal 
changes necessary to his consecration in England, 
had not yet been made, went to Scotland and re- 
ceived his Episcopal authority from the Scotch 
Bishops. Meanwhile there had been meetings in 
various places; and a Convention from seven 
States, held in Philadelphia, had appointed a 
Committee on the Prayer Book, which, of course, 
had to be adapted to the new political conditions. 
This committee prepared and reported a Revised 
Prayer Book, which was so radical in its conces- 
sions to extreme Protestantism and to infidelitv, 
that it was generally obnoxious to Churchmen 
everyw^here, and was virtually ignored in the pro- 
ceedings of the first General Convention of the 
whole Church, which met in Philadelphia in the 
fall of 1789. The American Prayer Book was 
adopted at that Convention, and it contained a 
very dignified and thoughtful Preface, in which 
the general reasons, political and other, are given 
for the changes that seemed expedient, and the 
principle is stated that in these changes, ^^this 
Church is far from intending to depart from the 
Church of England in any essential point of doc- 
trine, discipline, or worship : or further than local 



54 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

circumstances require.'' Some concessions were 
made in the American Book to local conditions and 
prejudices, whicli may seem to us to have been 
unnecessary, as for example, the permission to omit 
the sign of the cross in Baptism, but they did no 
harm. Every man, who knows the history of it, 
is glad that the Athanasian Creed (so-called) was 
omitted, and the Black Rubric with it. In recent 
years we have restored the Magnificat and the lon- 
ger Benedictus, and have made ample provision 
for shortened services. But incomparably the 
greatest gain of the American Revision — which 
reduces all other changes to insignificance — ^^vas 
the adoption, with a single modification, of the 
Scotch form of the Prayer of Consecration, with 
an explicit Oblation and an explicit Invocation of 
the Holy Spirit — which allies us with the Greek 
Church and conforms to the most ancient liturgies 
of Christendom. 

I venture to give, in conclusion, two quotations 
from writers on the Prayer Book, which seem to 
be of exceptional interest and value. The first 
is from the late Professor Shields of Princeton 
University, professor in the Presbyterian Theo- 
logical Seminary. He says: 

^'The English Liturgy, next to the English 
Bible, is the most wonderful product of the 
Reformation. The very fortunes of the book 



THE BOOK OF CO]\JjMON PRAYER 55 

are the romance of history. As we trace its 
development, its rubrics seem dyed in the blood 
of martyrs ; its offices echo with polemic phrases ; 
its canticles mingle with the battle-cries of 
armed sects and factions; and its successive re- 
visions mark the career of dynasties, states, and 
churches. Cavalier, Covenanter, and Puritan 
have crossed their swords over it; scholars and 
soldiers, statesmen and Churchmen, Kings and 
Commoners, have united in defending it. Eng- 
land, Germany, Geneva, Scotland, and America 
have by turns been the scene of its conflicts. 
Far beyond the little island which was its birth- 
place, its influence has been silently spreading 
in connection with great political and religious 
changes, generation after generation, from land 
to land, even where its name was never heard. 
... It would be strange if a work which thus 
has its roots in the past, should not be sending 
forth its branches into the whole Church of the 
future; and anyone who will take the pains to 
study its present adaptations, whatever may 
have been his prejudices, must admit that there 
is no other extant formulary which is so well 
fitted to become the rallying-point and standard 
of modern Christendom. In it are to be found 
the means — possibly the germs — of a just reor- 
ganization of Protestantism, as well as an ulti- 



56 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

mate reconciliation with true Catholicism — 
such a Catholicism as shall have shed everything 
sectarian and national, and retained only what 
is common to the whole Church of Christ in all 
ages and countries. Whilst to the true Protes- 
tant it offers Evangelical doctrine, worship, and 
unity, on the terms of the Reformation, it still 
preserves for the true Catholic, the choicest for- 
mulas of antiquity, and to all Christians of every 
name opens a liturgical system at once scriptural 
and reasonable, doctrinal and devotional, learned 
and vernacular, artistic and spiritual. It is 
not too much to say, that were the problem 
given, to frame out of the imperfectly organ- 
ized and sectarian Christianity of our times a 
liturgical model for the Communion of Saints 
in the one universal Church, the result might 
be expressed in some such compilation as the 
English Book of Common Prayer." 
The second quotation is from Edmund Clar- 
ence Stedman's Nature of Poetry, pp. 281-283. 
He says : 

^^Upon its literary and constructive side, I 
regard the venerable Liturgy of the Historic 
Christian Church as one of the few World- 
Poems — Poems Universal. I care not which 
of its rituals you follow, the Oriental, the Alex- 
andrian, the Latin, or the Anglican. The lat- 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 57 

ter, that of the Episcopal Prayer Book, is a 
version familiar to jow of what seems to me the 
most wonderful symphonic idealization of 
human faith — certainly the most inclusive — 
blending in harmonic succession all the cries 
and longings of the universal human heart in- 
voking a paternal Creator. ... I have in mind 
its human quality; the mystic tide of human 
hope, imagination^ prayer, sorrows, and pas- 
sionate expression, upon which it bears the wor- 
shipper along, and wherewith it has sustained 
men's souls with conceptions of Deity and im- 
mortality through hundreds, yes thousands, of 
undoubting years. ... It has been a growth, 
an exhalation, an apocalyptic cloud arisen, with 
the prayer of the Saints, from the climes of the 
Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman, the Goth, to 
spread in time over half the world. It is the 
voice of human brotherhood, the blended voice 
of rich and poor, old and young, the wise and 
the simple, the statesman and the c1ot\ti; the 
brotherhood of an age, which knowing little, 
comprehended little, and could have no refuge 
save trust in the oracles, through which a just 
and merciful Protector, a Pervading Spirit, a 
Living Mediator and Consoler, had been re- 
vealed. . . . Its prayers are not only for all 
sorts and conditions of men, but for every stress 



58 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

of life in which mankind must feel in common 
— in the household or isolated, or in tribal or 
national effort, and in calamity and repentance 
and thanksgiving. Its wisdom is forever old 
and perpetually new ; its calendar celebrates all 
seasons of the rolling year; its narrative is of 
the simplest, the most pathetic, the most rap- 
turous and ennobling life, the world has ever 
known. There is no malefactor so wretched, 
no just man so perfect, as not to find his hope, 
his consolation, his lesson, in this poem of 
poems. I have called it lyrical ; it is dramatic 
in structure and effect; it is an epic of the age 
of faith ; but in fact as a piece of inclusive lit- 
erature, it has no counterpart and can have no 
successor. '^ 






THE PRAYER BOOK 

AS A PRODUCT OF THE REFORMATION 

HAVE shown in the previous lecture, 
that the Book of Common Prayer was 
a product of the Reformation move- 
ment, and that this movement in Eng- 
land extended over a long period of one hundred 
and twenty-seven years — from the abolition of the 
Papal Supremacy in 1534 to the Savoy Conference 
in 1661. 

In this present lecture I shall try to show what 
the Reformation movement was, what caused it, 
and how in the largest perspective it ought to be 
judged. As the whole organization of human 
society was affected, and the civilized human race 
itself changed its point of view, during those years 
of controversy and tumult, we must be prepared 
to find the subject complicated and difficult to 
analyze. 

However, by studying the Reformation under 
three aspects — Political, Intellectual, and Reli- 
gious — we may reach a more comprehensive and 
a wiser and fairer understanding of it. 

I. Politically, the Reformation may be said to 



00 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

have been the revolt of the National spirit against 
the programme of Universal Empire, which 
Charlemagne and Pope Leo had launched in the 
year 800. For six hundred and fifty years the 
people of Europe had been treated as pawns in the 
great game which the German Emperor played 
with the Roman Popes, each claiming superiority. 
The Pope conceived of himself as the only Vicar of 
Christ on earth and of all other earthly sovereigns 
as related to himself, as the moon to the sun, shin- 
ing by reflected light. The Emperor was supposed 
to be an advocate or defender of the Papacy, whose 
duty it was to keep peace, to hold the clergy and 
people in obedience, and to punish heretics and 
schismatics. The Emperor's power, analogous to 
that of the Pope's, was universal, and his quasi- 
ecclesiastical character entitled him to be arrayed 
on occasion in ecclesiastical vestments; for as 
Bryce says, ^^The Holy Roman Church and the 
Holy Roman Empire were one and the same thing, 
in two aspects." ' For about two hundred years 
the Crusades furnished at least the aj)pearance of 
a common work, which checked the growth of the 
national consciousness, but little by little different 
languages, different temperaments, different geo- 
graphical boundaries, asserted themselves and the 



^ Holy Roman Empire, p. 201. 



THE PRAYER BOOK 61 

various groups became specialized with peculiar 
habits and institutions. By the end of the fif- 
teenth century these nationalities had grown, 
through war and commerce^ into strong monarchi- 
cal governments, which refused even a nominal 
recognition of the Holy Roman Empire. Spain 
was united under Ferdinand and Isabella. In 
France the concentration of all power in the king, 
the creation of a compact and solid kingdom out 
of a number of rival and hostile provinces, signi- 
fied not only territorial union, but administrative 
autocracy, and indicated that France had come to 
manhood under Francis I. Just at the same time 
England emerged from the terrible wars of the 
barons, which left the power of the nobility weak- 
ened and its numbers greatly diminished ; the Com- 
mons wearied with the long struggle; and "the 
great monarchical administrative unity towering 
high over the prostrate estates," embodied in two 
kings — one Henry VII. "who was a tyrant in self- 
defense," and the other, his son, Henry VIII. 
"who was a tyrant from sheer self-will." In Ger- 
many, Maximilian had concentrated in his own 
hands the territorial possessions of the Hapsburgs 
and had united Austria and her outlying states. 
All over the world the national spirit was awake 
and was ready to rebel against the old Imperial 
Order with which the Church was identified. 



62 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

IL When we come to the Intellectual view- 
point, we note that the scholastic philosophy, which 
represented the intellectual activity of the Middle 
Ages, reached its climax in the thirteenth century, 
and the characteristic of scholasticism was that it 
undertook to settle all questions in heaven and 
earth, and settled them dogmatically without ap- 
peal. All possible religious questions were solved 
by reference to the Church's decisions, and ques- 
tions which fell altogether outside of ecclesiastical 
limits — questions for example of observation and 
physical science — were decided by an appeal to 
Aristotle, who was called ^Hhe Philosopher" par 
excellence, or were determined a priori. The in- 
ductive method, by which judgments are derived 
from ascertained facts, was practically unknown. 
Against this kind of dogmatism the human mind 
was asserting in every direction its impatience and 
intolerance. 

The artistic and literary revival began with 
the canvas and fresco painting of Cimabue and 
Giotto, and the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and 
Boccaccio in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies. In all this movement there was a mani- 
fest desire to go back to old classic models. Pope 
Julius II. tore down the venerable Basilica of St. 
Peter in order to rebuild it in the style of a classi- 
cal heathen temple. Men were intoxicated with 



THE PRAYER BOOK 63 

the new learning, i.e.j, with the study of Latin and 
Greek, and the art and literature of the Greeks, 
and this received a tremendous impetus by the fall 
of Constantinople in 1453, when so many Greek 
scholars came into the West for residence. And 
in this classical revival — this Renaissance as it is 
called — its devotees swallowed the ancient litera- 
ture, dregs and all, and became paganized. Of 
Pope Leo X. who succeeded Julius and was a 
friend of Ariosto, of Machiavelli, of Raphael — 
Sarpi, in his History of the Council of Trent, says : 
^^He would have been a Pope absolutely complete 
if, with his love of music and his gentle kindness, 
he had joined some knowledge in things concern- 
ing religion." And this was the Pope who ex- 
communicated Martin Luther and set the fire of 
the Reformation ablaze. Blatant skepticism and 
gross immorality characterized the Pagan Renais- 
sance in Italy: but that same intellectual awaken- 
ing among the Teutonic races — in Germany and 
England — drove scholars to the study of the N^ew 
Testament in the original and to fierce rejection 
of teachings that were inconsistent with it. It is 
easy to see how such a movement, once started, 
could lead to crass individualism exploiting a thou- 
sand vagaries and rebelling against all authority. 
At the same time let us remember, as Aubrey 
Moore said, "Real liberty may always become li- 



64 THE EPISCOPAL CHUPvCH 

cense^ but that is not an argument in favor of 
bondage. '^ "^ 

It is profoundly true, that the Reformation 
was the revelation of a new branch of the human 
race to the world. The Teutonic peoples had been 
brought under a Roman civilization as early as the 
fourth century, and they had been steadily grow- 
ing in weight and importance; but they had not 
occupied a position of supremacy like that of Italy 
or France or Spain. In Grod's Providence they 
made the intellectual awakening of the sixteenth 
century religious, and by sound learning and a 
certain native reverence and serious-mindedness, 
saved the moral ideals of Christendom and gave 
the movement of mere intellectual revolt a positive 
spiritual value. From the sixteenth century the 
Teutonic peoples begin to take the leading place 
in the world's progress and the centre of gravity 
of European politics is transferred forever to the 
north of the Alps.^ 

III. From the aspect of Religion and Morals, 
the Reformation was a revolt of faith and con- 
science and reason against unreality: against the 
substitution of the trappings of religion for re- 
ligion itself. Every religion sooner or later tends 
to fixity and rigidity of form, and there is always 



^ Lectures on the Reformation. 
^ See Collins, The Reformation. 



THE PEAYER BOOK 65 

danger of treating the form as though it were the 
religion — that was the condition of Jewish religion 
in the time of Christ. Deep feelings express them- 
selves in acts ; then the acts rightly become sacred ; 
and then perhaps the good act degenerates into 
mere mechanical routine. What roused the Re- 
formers was St. Paul's clarion appeal in the Epis- 
tle to the Galatians for the recognition of the su- 
preme importance of the individual human soul, 
and its sacred right of direct communion with God. 

Whatever mistakes he made, and like all dar- 
ing human spirits he did make some tremendous 
mistakes, Martin Luther was a man of great 
genius, of lofty purpose and passionate earnest- 
ness ; and when he went to Rome to visit the Holy 
City of his Faith, the spectacle of the pomp of 
formal and frequent religious observances, con- 
ducted by men whose daily lives were a by-word 
and a hissing for their iniquities, stunned and 
appalled him; and what was true of the leaders 
of the Italian Renaissance was true to a degree 
elsewhere. 

The fact was that the organization of the Me- 
diaeval Church had become unwieldv. Institu- 
tions, once useful, had outlived their usefulness. 
Monasticism fostered an idle and lazy class of men. 
There were too many clergy, and many of them 
led unworthy lives. Ecclesiastical discipline, as 



66 ^ THE EPISCOPx\L CHURCH 

Creighton says, from the Court of Rome down to 
every diocesan court, was a vexatious means of 
exacting money; and justice was too often a mat- 
ter of bargain and sale. And while this seems 
terrible to us, let it be understood that it is only 
part of the story — one side of the picture, though 
a very conspicuous side. There were many 
thousands of men and women in the Church — even 
in the Italian section of the Church — whose spir- 
itual life and enthusiasm were as high and beauti- 
ful as any age could boast of, and who found in 
these very forms and ceremonies the reality of the 
Presence and Power of the Living Christ. ^^The 
Oratory of Divine Love," to cite only one in- 
stance, produced characters and taught doctrines 
as pure and as evangelical as were ever produced 
in the world. It was the influence of spirits like 
these in the previous century which had created 
the reform movement, sixty years before Luther 
was born, and had groaned over the failure of 
council after council to accomplish anything, be- 
cause the ecclesiastical politicians were always in 
control. 

Certainly the fair-minded student of history 
must admit, that the Roman Hierarchy had re- 
ceived notice one hundred years before the break 
came, and it was at last their persistent and in- 
vincible blindness and bigotry that drove many of 



THE PRAYER BOOK 67 

the Church's noblest and most loyal children into 
a revolt, which they deeply deplored. It was« 
simply a case of driving and forcing men's souls, 
and he who tries to force the souls of men, ^^tilts 
with a straw against a champion cased in ada- 
mant." 

THE REFORiVIATION IN ENGLAND IN THESE 
THREE ASPECTS 

When we come to study the Reformation in 
England as a Political, Intellectual, and Religious 
Movement, we are able at once to account for its 
peculiarities — ^peculiarities that differentiate it 
from the movement on the Continent and give to 
the English Church, the Ecclesia Anglicanu, a 
mediating position in Christendom. As Dr. 
Beard, the learned Unitarian Hibbert lecturer, 
says: ^^When a laborious German compiler enu- 
merates the English among the Reformed 
Churches, which own a Genevan origin, ... an 
Anglican Churchman can only be amused. And 
in truth such a procedure is conspicuously unfaith- 
ful to historical fact. Lutheran, Calvinistic, per- 
haps even Zwinglian lines of influence upon the 
English Reformation may be traced without diffi- 
culty; but there was a native element, stronger 
than any of them, which at once assimilated them 
and gave its own character to the result." * 



* Hihhert Lectures, p. 301. 



68 THE EPISCOPAL CPIUKCH 

(1) First, then, considered as a Political 
Movement, the Reformation appealed to the mind 
and heart of a very powerful king, who had al- 
ready dreamed of supplanting the so-called Roman 
Emperor and of assuming the imperial title him- 
self. Professor Freeman, in the article on Eng- 
land in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Bnt- 
annica, stresses this fact as necessary to the under- 
standing of Henry's attitude. Moreover, during 
the years of Henry VII's reign England had grown 
tremendously in power and wealth, and her pros- 
perous middle class of merchant people wanted 
freedom from any foreign dominion. When 
therefore the king, whose popularity with all 
classes was enormous, who was extolled by for- 
eigners like Erasmus for his learning and culture, 
and by his subjects for his lavish generosity and 
robust manliness ; when this King Henry declared 
that the foreign Pope had violated the law in per- 
mitting him to marry his brother's widow; when 
it was whispered that she could never bear a son 
to succeed the king, and that this might lead to 
more confusion and possible warfare, his subjects 
sympathized with his purpose to have the marriage 
with Katharine annulled. Moreover, every mod- 
ern writer admits that the Pope's policy as to this 
annulment was not straightforward. The facts 
seem to justify the conclusion that if Katharine 



THE PRAYER BOOK G9 

had not been the annt of Charles V. Emperor of 
Germany^ who had the Pope in his power, the 
annulment of the marriage would have been 
granted easily ^^for a consideration.'^ When at 
last Henry, in 1534 vaulted, as it were, into the 
Reformation Movement, he immediately asserted 
aggressively his royal prerogative, and demanded 
that he be recognized as Head of the Chnrch and 
be paid a fine from the clergy of two million 
pounds, or ten million dollars. The terrified 
clergy paid the fine and they also acknowledged the 
title, with the proviso ^^as far as the law of Christ 
will allow." Technically, King Henry had all the 
law and precedent on his side. Other kings had 
done the same thing. He was in the exact posi- 
tion that Philip IV. of France had been. Yon 
will all recall the words, which Shakespeare puts 
into the mouth of King John — just three hundred 
years before Henry's time : 

'*'Tell the Pope this tale; and from the mouth of Engkind 
Add thus much more, that no Italian Priest 
Shall tithe or toll in our Dominions; 
But as we, under Heaven are Supreme Head, 
So under Him that great Supremacy, 
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold. 
Without the assistance of a mortal hand: 
So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart 
To him and his usurped authority." (K. John, III, i.) 

Doubtless Henry argued thus with himself, for 

at heart he was a loyal son of Rome. But he had 



70 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

poured oil on the fire and the conflagration was 
complete, and not to be extinguished, until the 
barnacles of a thousand years' growth, and possi- 
bly something of the ship itself had been burned 
away. It was the natural result of historical cir- 
cumstance and tradition, that the Reformation in 
the English Church should take on a political com- 
plexion. The Church and State in England had 
been inextricably interlaced and interrelated by 
the growth of centuries. It was through the unity 
of the Church, as Stubbs shows in his Constitu- 
tional History, that the people in the separate 
kingdoms in England gradually waked up to the 
sense of a common political destiny; and under 
King Alfred the formal organization of the King- 
dom of England really grew out of, and was 
created by, the antecedent unity of the Church. 
The Bishops of the Church became leaders in 
parliamentary affairs and until the sixteenth cen- 
tury there never had been a Lay Lord Chancellor. 
The King's relation to the Church was in his 
Kingdom something like that of the Holy Roman 
Emperor and he was accorded a quasi-ecclesias- 
tical, a quasi-spiritual authority. He could not 
make a Bishop, Priest, or Deacon — that was a 
spiritual and ecclesiastical function — ^but he could 
grant or withhold the right to officiate. When the 
Pope's supremacy over England was repudiated. 



THE PRAYER BOOK 71 

all jurisdiction of State and Church was trans- 
ferred to the King and he assumed the title Su- 
preme Head of the Church ; and while in his later 
years he took great liberties, yet he never pre- 
sumed to perform any spiritual function. He 
had to exercise his authority through Convocation 
and Parliament. It is evident, however, and for 
the above reasons, that through the whole process 
of Keformation in England, for a century and a 
quarter, political considerations and political 
changes had a peculiar and unparalleled influence 
upon the Church. 

(2) When we consider the Reformation as an 
Intellectual Movement in England we are at once 
impressed by the manifestations of the English 
habit of mind. Englishmen, as a class, have been 
practical people and not metaphysicians. The 
French philosopher said: ^^I think, therefore I 
am," but a great Englishman said: ^^I act, there- 
fore I am." (Westcott.) That expresses the point. 
There were from the beginning of the Reforma- 
tion the three tendencies — one towards extreme 
Continental Protestantism, one towards extreme 
Papalism, or what we call Mediaevalism, and then 
there was the conservative attitude of most influ- 
ential Englishmen, who were not compromisers 
but harmonizers. This last class won the day after 
a long struggle and the English Church finally 



72 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

emerged with a clearly defined policy, which may 
be expressed in three propositions, viz. : 

1. The integrity and continuity of the 
Church, with the primitive institution of the sac- 
raments, must be maintained at all costs. 

2. The Holy Scriptures must be frankly ac- 
cepted as the sole basis of doctrine and Church 
government; and whatever may be clearly shown 
by sound learning to have been the facts of the 
Gospel and of the foundation of the Church, 
must be honestly admitted whether they seem to 
fit in with pre-conceived theories or not. The 
chief concern is not to get a logical system but 
to get at the truth ; and the Church is the keeper 
and witness of Holy Scripture and not the infalli- 
ble interpreter of it. 

3. The Book of Common Prayer is the prac- 
tical and concrete expression of this intellectual 
attitude. 

It is interesting and instructive to note in this 
connection, that, while from time to time Ex- 
planatory Articles of Religion were set forth in 
England, they were never meant nor understood 
to be Creedal statements, like the Apostles or Ni- 
cene Creeds. 

At the very outset of the Reform Movement it 
was declared by law (25 Henry VIH. c. 21, A. D. 
1533), ^^That the King and Parliament did not 



THE PRAYER BOOK 73 

by it (i. e., by repudiating the Pope's Supremacy) 
intend to decline or vary from the congregation 
of Christ's Church in anything concerning the 
very articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom, 
and in any other things declared by Scripture and 
the Word of God necessary for salvation." 

And Queen Elizabeth took care to write to 
the Catholic princes of Europe, "^o new religion 
has been set up in England, but that which was 
commanded by Our Saviour, practised by the 
primitive church and approved by the fathers of 
the best antiquity." (See Benton, XXIII.) 

The three Creeds, viz. : The Creed called the 
Apostles Creed, the Creed called the Nicene Creed, 
and the Creed, or rather hymn, called the Athana- 
sian Creed (still recited on special days in the 
Church of England) were regarded as sufficient 
statements of the faith. But no less than eight 
explanations or statements of Christian Doctrine 
were set forth between the years 1536 and 1571. 
The last of these statements, called the XXXIX 
Articles of Religion, has still to be subscribed to 
by the Clergy in the English Church, and they 
contain a very judicious and carefully worded 
declaration of the position of the Church of Eng- 
land on the fundamental truths of religion and on 
the controverted questions of that time. They do 
not cover all points of Christian Doctrine and 



^ 



74 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

they claim to be only "articles agreed upon by the 
Archbishops, Bishops, and Clergy, of the year 
1562, for the avoiding of diversities of opinions, 
and for the establishing of consent touching true 
religion'': and, in order, as the "Declaration'' 
says, that "the disputes may be shut up in God's 
promises as they be generally set forth to us in 
the Holy Scriptures and the general meaning of 
the Articles of the Church." The articles, al- 
though printed at the end of the American Prayer 
Book are not really a part of it, and we use them 
only as a basis to furnish an outline for the in- 
struction of our students in Theology and as an 
interesting memorial of past controversy. 

4. The English Reformation, as a moral and 
religious movement, which I hope to discuss at 
more length in my last lecture, is well described 
by John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, 
London, in a sermon which he preached in 1511, 
and which has come down to us as good contem- 
porary evidence. 

The whole sermon is an earnest appeal for the 
reform of abuses which are destroying the influ- 
ence of the Church and turning men's minds away 
from religion. He speaks of worldly pomp and 
ambition, of feasting and babbling and carnal con- 
cupiscence, among the clergy, of their greed and 
avarice, and the corresponding effect upon the 



THE PRAYER BOOK 75 

laitj. He laments the existence of nepotism and 
simony and non-residence and pluralities — ^^boys 
for old men, fools for wise men, evil for good, do 
reign and rule/' Bishops absent from their dio- 
ceses, curates and vicars and parish priests, hold- 
ing many livings, and drawing their salaries, and 
living away from home, and all this with the 
knowledge and consent of the highest authority. 

'No wonder that religious doctrine was corrupt 
and religious practices debased with superstition. 
No wonder that there was popular unrest and the 
wide-spread desire for change. 

Political, intellectual, moral, ecclesiastical, 
conditions — all were gathering force to precipi- 
tate the storm. The only thing that was needed 
was a clash, a jolt, an explosion, and that was fur- 
nished by the King's quarrel. 

The results were far off and were to be accom- 
plished only after much trial and suffering and 
bitter misunderstandings and mistrust. But when 
the equilibrium was reached, the Church of Eng- 
land, like a storm-tossed ship, found herself, at 
least not wrecked nor seriously disfigured, but 
manned by stout hearts — free men in a free 
Church — on an even keel and in an open sea. 



i 


i 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 

AND THE DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL ABUSES 
WHICH IT SUPERSEDED 

HAVE given in the previous lectures 
a sketch of the history of the Prayer 
Book and of the causes, both in Eng- 
land and on the Continent, which 
brought about that Eef ormation of Religion, which 
constituted one of the most influential epochs in 
the history of mankind. According to the most 
recent statistics there are about 500 million Chris- 
tians in the world, of whom about 250 millions 
reject, and quite 150 millions, in one way or an- 
other, appeal to the principles that were declared 
at the Reformation. The other 100 millions rep- 
resent a portion of Christendom not affected by 
the movement. According to the judgment of the 
best modern scholars (of Professor Beard, Unitar- 
ian, Hibbert Lecturer) the Reformation in Eng- 
land was sui generis and must be studied apart 



78 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

from the similar movements on the continent of 
Europe. 

The task, therefore, which I have set for my- 
self in this lecture is the description of the changes 
which took place in the doctrine, discipline and 
worship of the Church of England (and, therefore, 
in our own Episcopal Church) during the period 
which we have been considering. I shall try to 
give a brief but intelligible account of the un- 
Catholic (and by this I mean the unhistorical and 
un-primitive) teaching and practice which pre- 
vailed in England at the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, and the reformation of this doctrine and 
practice which took place and is embodied in the 
Book of Common Prayer. 

The most conspicuous abuses in Doctrinal 
teaching were connected with the two great sub- 
jects, viz.: the State of the Dead and the Sacra- 
ment of the Holy Eucharist. 

It is easy to understand what a hold on the 
imaginations of men, in that fierce and warring 
time, when human life was cheap, was the doc- 
trine of Purgatory. It was a comparatively new 
doctrine — but it suited human needs. In prac- 
tice it meant simply that no soul, however wicked, 
ever went straight to hell, but to an intermediate 
state of torture, from which it could be delivered 
by the prayers of the Church, and more especially 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 79 

by the offering of the Mass. Thus Purgatory 
took the place of Hell and encouraged men to 
sin with a royal gusto, provided they left enough 
money to pay for the masses that would shorten 
their time in this material underworld of remedial 
punishment. The applications for these special 
masses for the dead became so numerous and fre- 
quent that a special order of Priests had to be 
provided for this purpose; and chantries, with 
special altars, were arranged in or added to the 
churches for their accommodation. As the Mass 
could not be celebrated after noon, laws had to be 
passed prescribing how many masses could rev- 
erently be said by a Priest on the same day. It 
was a common saying that ^^there are no rich peo- 
ple in Purgatory — only the poor and the fools." 
(See Bp. Hall, IX., 18.) 

Thus one abuse led to another, and the Holy 
Communion practically ceased to be a Communion 
at all; comparatively few laymen received the 
sacrament more than once a year and this custom 
prevailed even in many monastic establishments. 
When they did receive it, it was administered 
only in one kind, and this custom of refusing the 
chalice to the laity had an extraordinary history. 
It was condemned by Pope Urban II. at the 
Council of Clermont in 1095, and although the 
Council of Constance (1439) finally authorized 



80 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

it, some parishes in the diocese of Durham, Eng- 
land, ignored it as late as 1515. This illustrates 
the independent spirit in the Church of Eng- 
land — which crops out persistently during the 
whole Mediaeval period. 

It must be remembered that we are writing 
about an age when the masses of the people were 
rude and ignorant and credulous beyond our com- 
prehension, and unfortimately the men in high 
position, who knew better, permitted their greed of 
power to take advantage of the popular weakness 
and credulity. For example, the doctrine of trans- 
substantiation was a purely metaphysical and al- 
most unintelligible effort to reconcile the plain fact 
of the existence of the bread and wine after they 
were consecrated by the Priest, with the theory 
that they did not exist ; but the popular application 
of this doctrine, and the legends that arose reciting 
incidents of the consecrated bread seen bleeding 
on the altar, are almost appalling in their gross- 
ness. When a personage as great as Pope Urban 
V. could and did send a piece of mixed wax and 
balsam to an Emperor, with the solemn assurance 
that it would protect him from lightning and fire 
and shipwreck, etc., we cannot wonder at the 
popular use of charms, the reverence for relics 
and images, and the silly and vicious superstitions 
that prevailed. The practice of indulgences made 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 81 

salvation^ to use the language of the time, a matter 
of money, or, as we say, a matter of dollars and 
cents. It began with the crusades, when knights 
leaving their homes for this foreign war were 
assured by Papal decree, that they would be clear 
from all consequences of sin in case of death. 
(See Blunt, v. L, p. 37.) 

In the sixteenth century. Pope Leo X., in 
order to raise money to build St. Peter's Cathe- 
dral in Rome, sold indulgences by wholesale to 
the Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg and he 
in turn farmed them out to agents, who sold them 
on commission. One of these agents, John Tetzel, 
came into collision wdth Martin Luther, and that 
started the Reformation in Germany. These in- 
dulgences really represented the practical result 
of compulsory auricular confession, before Com- 
munion, which had been decreed for the first time 
in the Lateran Council of 1215. When a man 
or woman confessed sins to a Priest, absolution 
had to be accompanied, if not conditioned, by an 
act of penance. This penance after a while took 
the form of a fine in money. Thus the indul- 
gence, or remission of penance, could be bought 
beforehand. Some fine distinctions have been at- 
tempted by authors in dealing with this subject; 
for example, that remitting the penalty for sin 
beforehand is not the same thing as giving permis- 



82 THE EPISCOPAL CHUECH 

sioii to sin; but you must consider the average 
ignorance and superstition of the age and draw 
your own conclusions. It is evident from the 
controversies of the time (and we have an abun- 
dant literature to inform us) that another popular 
objection to the obligatory confessional was that 
it too was made an instrument of tyranny. As a 
learned writer of the sixteenth century declares 
(Hall, V. IX, p. 19) : ^^The virtue of absolution 
depends on the fulness of confession: and that 
upon examination: and the sufficiency of exami- 
nation is so full of scruples, besides those infinite 
cases of unresolved doubts, that the poor soul 
never knows when it is clear." And on top of 
all this was the doctrine of intention commonly 
taught and set forth by the Keforming Council 
of Trent, that unless the ministers of the sacra- 
ments really intend to administer the grace ac- 
cording to the order of the Church, their spoken 
words and external acts count for nothing, and 
the sacrament is not valid. According to this it 
would seem, certainly, that a man could never 
know whether he has ever been baptized or con- 
firmed or married or absolved or communicated. 
No magnifying of the popularity and power of 
Elizabeth (I do not mention Henry VIII., because 
he was in favor of most of these abuses) will ac- 
count for the rapid spread of the Reformed opin- 



THE BOOK OF COIVBION PRAYER 83 

ions in England. The people at large were glad 
to have a change. Many of the abuses, above de- 
scribed — abuses of doctrine and authority — af- 
fected very intimately the religious life of the 
laity ; and so long as they were persuaded that these 
practices were authorized by the Scriptures, they 
had to submit; but when the Bible was made an 
open book for every man to read and study for him- 
self, they joined eagerly in the revolt. Moreover, 
the Monastic ideal, which had become the supreme 
Christian ideal, exalted asceticism and disparaged 
the common life of people — treating it as some- 
thing inferior, if not worthless. When, therefore, 
the monasteries were abolished and the clergy 
were permitted to marry ; and the Christian family 
and the Christian home — for both clergy and 
laity — ^became the training ground for piety and 
the exemplification of true religion, the entire 
everyday social life of the people was consecrated 
and every activity — political, economic, educa- 
tional and recreative — took on a new meaning and 
value. Really, when we read the story and con- 
sider how many and strong were the appeals which 
the movement made to the average mind, we can- 
not be surprised at excesses of individualism, but 
only astonished at the conservatism, that finally 
triumphed. 

The Reform movement in the reigns of Henry 



84 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 

VIII. and Edward VI., we may say was but the 
first step taken by the Church of England in 
reaching the position, which was finally taken, 
for weal or woe, in 1662. The movement in 
Henry's reign was dominated by the King him- 
self, who hated the Pope, plundered the monas- 
teries, and disapproved of the most important of 
the Reformation principles ; and Edward VI. was 
a boy, ruled by the Protectors, Somerset and North- 
umberland, who seized the opportunity to con- 
fiscate more of the Church property and were en- 
couraged, for ulterior purposes, by the disciples 
of Calvin in Switzerland to make the Church more 
and more a mere department of the State. The 
reign lasted only six years, and from the reforms 
that were proposed, it would appear that the 
ancient Church of England was drifting to ship- 
wreck and complete ruin. Mary and Elizabeth 
together saved the Church — Mary by permitting 
the Spanish Inquisitors to make the anti-Reforma- 
tion movement odious, and Elizabeth by her 
splendid and patriotic intelligence, that put men 
of great ability and learning at the head of affairs 
and gave the real esprit de corps of Churchmen 
a chance to grow and assert itself. Her Arch- 
bishop, Parker, was an historian of proved learn- 
ing, and during her reign men like Jewell and 
Hooker and Andrewes and Bancroft more than 



THE BOOK OF COJ^IMON PRAYER 85 

held their ground against the Roman and Puritan 
controversialists. Hooker appealed to reason, and 
Andrewes appealed to history, and the fair-minded 
reader must admit that the arguments they mar- 
shalled, whether they were valid or not, certainly 
were not answered. They declared and defended 
the principles which the Book of Common Prayer 
embodies and illustrates, and which the Anglican 
Communion has stood for ever since. They 
proved the integrity and organic continuity of the 
Church, its ministry and sacraments, and showed 
that her doctrinal liberality, her refusal to go be- 
yond the great historic Creeds in her requirements 
for Baptism and Communion, was in conformity 
with the use and practice of the earliest and 
purest age of the Church. They swept aside the 
accumulated superstitions of centuries and ap- 
pealed to the Scriptures and to the facts of prim- 
itive Christian customs and ideals. They agreed, 
however, upon the fundamental and characteristic 
principles and usages of historical Christianity, 
viz. : the supreme solemnity and value of the ser- 
vice of the Holy Communion and upon the nec- 
essity of Episcopal ordination. The reverent re- 
gard for the Sacrament implied the care for the 
ordination of the ministry, and the jealous con- 
servation of the Ministerial Succession implied 
the reverence for the Sacrament. They accepted 



86 THE EPISCOPAL CHUKCH 

and approved the ancient truth, that, as the Holy 
Communion was a supreme Ceremonial Action 
of the whole Church, the vestments of the clergy 
should be retained and other rites and ceremonies, 
not directly contrary to God's word, such as the 
use of the sign of the Cross, the ring in the Mar- 
riage service, the throwing of earth upon the cof- 
fin at burials, and other accessories of the service, 
which the experience of centuries had approved. 

This attitude aroused, of course, vehement and 
violent opposition from the extremists, who be- 
lieved, as he himself claimed, that John Calvin, 
at Geneva, Switzerland, was inspired of God, and 
that no order of service or Church Government 
ought to be permitted except that which he had 
originated, viz. : the Presbyterian Polity, with his 
Book of Holy Discipline and his peculiar forms 
of prayer. 

It was at once the misfortune and the privi- 
lege of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
from 1625 to 1647, to bear the brunt of this op- 
position of the Puritans. Laud was a man of 
sound learning, great ability, absolutely sincere; 
and his idea of the Church of England, as Creigh- 
ton says, was higher and truer than that of any 
other man of his time; but there was about him 
the coldness which comes of a strictly logical in- 
telligence, which was sure of its own ground and 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 87 

cared little for conciliation. Therefore^ he had 
little magnetism and few friends. His real fight 
was for intellectual freedom in the Church. His 
failure was due to the method and manner in 
which he sought to accomplish it. 

I have always thought that there was a de- 
cided likeness of disposition and intellect between 
Laud and Calvin. Both had logical minds and 
powerful intellects, but neither one of them had 
the sense of humor, without which there is no 
capacity to see things in right perspective. Arch- 
bishop Laud, however, died a martyr to the 
Church's cause, which, at that time, was the cause 
of intellectual liberty, and no man ever lived to 
whom the people who love the Book of Common 
Prayer, owe more than they do to him. 

On nearly every page of the Prayer Book you 
will find the marks of the conflict, through which 
as through a crucible, it has come down to us. 
Its very Title Page is a declaration of historical 
continuity with the past and of modest toleration. 
^^The Book of Common Prayer and Administra- 
tion of the Sacraments, and other Bites and Cere- 
monies of the Church, according to the use of the 
Church of England'' or /^of the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church." So also the Preface to the Ordinal 
asserts the facts of history, without criticism of 
any other form of Church Government. ^^It is 



88 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

evident unto all men, reading Holy Scripture and 
Ancient Authors, that from the Apostles' time 
there have been these Orders of Ministers in 
Christ's Church — Bishops, Priests, and Deacons 
. . . and no man shall be accounted or taken to be 
a lawful Bishop, Priest, or Deacon in this Church 
. . . except he hath had Episcopal consecration or 
ordination." So the general Preface to the whole 
Book, published after the last Revision in 1661, 
is as follows, viz. : ^^Of the sundry alterations 
proposed unto us, we have rejected all such as 
were either of dangerous consequence (as secretly 
striking some established doctrine or laudable 
practice of the Church of England, or indeed of 
the whole Catholic Church of Christ) or else of 
no consequence at all, but utterly frivolous and 
vain. But such alterations as were tendered to us 
as seemed to us in any way requisite and expedient 
we have willingly assented unto. . . . Our general 
aim was not to gratify this or that party . . . but 
to do that, which to our best understandings might 
most tend to the preservation of Peace and Unity 
in the Church: the procuring of reverence and 
exciting of Piety and Devotion in the Public 
Worship of God." 

The Office for the Administration of the Holy 
Communion with its rubrics will furnish us with 
a good example of the wise conservatism which 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 89 

characterized the Reformed Church of England 
in making the changes, which seemed absolutely 
necessary. Our Communion Service is substan- 
tially a translation of the Salisbury Missal, which 
had been used in England for five hundred 
years. This Missal was in its structure peculiar 
to the Church of England because when St. Augus- 
tine came to England in 596 he found the British 
Church already existing and organized, and was 
specially authorized by Pope Gregory to continue 
the use of the native liturgy with a few modifica- 
tions. Eor this reason the Communion Office of 
the Church of England is closer kin to the East- 
ern Liturgy of Ephesus than to that of Rome, 
and this is particularly true of the Communion 
Service of the Episcopal Church, which, as I 
have said elsewhere, has features derived from 
the Scotch Service Book taken directly from the 
East. 

It is a noteworthy and characteristic feature 
of this English Office that alone of all the liturgies 
it virtually begins with the recitation of the Ten 
Commandments. 'No other Commimion Service 
in Christendom has this provision; and it is re- 
ported of the Duke of Wellington, that he said 
on one occasion, when the disestablishment of the 
English Church was being discussed, that ^^it 
would be worth while to maintain the status of 



90 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

the Churcli, if for nothing else, just to have the 
Ten Commandments of the Moral Law recited 
every Sunday in every parish in the Kingdom." 

This provision, however, illustrates the learn- 
ing of the translators of our Communion Office; 
because it is well known to scholars, that some 
such lesson from the Old Testament was common 
in Eastern Liturgies. It was the religious genius 
of the English Eeformers that selected the Ten 
Commandments from various readings of the Old 
Testament. 

The Office was deliberately constructed so as 
to be a Communion Service and not a solitary 
Mass to be repeated by the Priest with rapid 
enunciation many times a day, without regard to 
whether there were any persons present to re- 
ceive the sacrament, after the manner of the 
^^Chantry Priests.'^ In the first Prayer Book, the 
name ^^Mass" was referred to in the title ^^The 
Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, 
commonly called The Mass" ; but this latter name 
was dropped in subsequent revisions of the Prayer 
Book, because it was not a primitive name for 
the Holy Communion; it had no special signifi- 
cance,^ being a barbarous Latin designation for 
any kind of religious service; it was never heard 



^iVide, Catholic (Roman) Dictionary, p. 562. 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYEE 91 

of before the end of the fourth century; and be- 
cause it was connected in the popular mind with 
so many mediaeval abuses as to be liable to be 
misunderstood. The same cautious attitude was 
observed with regard to the practice of compulsory 
auricular confession, which had been so inti- 
mately associated with the Holy Communion and 
out of which the whole system of Indulgences — 
the burning question of the German Reforma- 
tion — had grown. For four hundred years there 
was a custom prevalent in the Church of open 
confession of sins, in more or less minute detail, 
before the congregation, and this naturally led to 
scandals and to the relegation of such self-dis- 
closures to the privacy of the closet; but it was 
not until 1215 A. D. that the Pope decreed that 
every Christian man and woman was solemnly 
obligated to make Confession to the Priest at 
least once a year. The practical result of this 
decree was to encourage reliance upon the mere 
formal obedience to an ecclesiastical rule, and 
weaken the sense of individual responsibility. 

On this whole subject, bristling with difficul- 
ties as it was, the Church of England took what 
it seems to me was a brave as well as a wise 
position. She did not yield to the Puritan 
clamor and repudiate a practice which had a very 
real foundation in human nature's needs (for 



92 THE EPISCOPAL CHUPvCH 

the Wesley ans had to revive it), but declared that 
this method of seeking pardon for one's sins was 
purely voluntary and for exceptional cases. The 
language in the Communion Office is: ^^If there 
be any of you who by this means (i. e., by ordinary 
repentance and confession and readiness to make 
restitution) cannot quiet his own conscience here- 
in, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let 
him come to me or some other discreet and learned 
Minister of God's Word and open his grief; 
that by the ministry of God's Holy Word he may 
receive the benefit of absolution, together with 
ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his 
conscience and the avoiding of all scruple and 
doubtfulness." 

The same wise moderation permits the use of 
either leavened or unleavened bread, and allows 
but does not compel the use of the special Euchar- 
istic Vestments. The Reservation of the Sacra- 
ment, in any way whatever, is not mentioned in 
the Prayer Book and certainly is not authorized. 
The first Prayer Book did provide for the carry- 
ing of the Sacrament on days, when there was 
a stated Communion, to sick folk Avho could not 
get to Church, and this was a most ancient and 
precious custom of the early Church; but even 
this ^^Reservation for the sick" had to be dis- 
continued, because it was taken advantage of by 



THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 93 

party men and made the excuse for Reserving 
the Sacrament as an object of Divine Worship 
(Latreia), a very modern and misleading custom, 
unknown to-day to the churches of Eastern Chris- 
tendom. 

We may fitly conclude this lecture with a quo- 
tation from the late Dr. Brooke Foss Westcott, 
Bishop of Durham, one of the greatest scholars 
and most philosophical thinkers that the English- 
speaking world has produced : ' 

'^Our island home/' he said, ^^has profoundly 
affected our history and character. . . . With 
us State and Church have from the first grown 
side by side. Each has acted on the other. . . . 
In the Great Charter of English Liberties the 
Church of England (Ecclesia Anglicana) holds 
the foremost place. . . . The intimate intercourse 
of the spiritual and temporal powers of England 
has at once guarded the freedom of Churchmen 
and increased their responsibility. It has checked 
the inclination of theological students to multiply 
the definitions of dogma, which, even when cor- 
rect, tend to mar the simplicity and breadth of 
that with which they deal. In this respect the 
English Reformation differed essentially from 
the typical Reformations on the Continent. It 



Lessons from WorJc, p. 52. 



94 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

was a Reformation and not a reconstruction. It 
made no attempt to do away with the past. . . . 
It showed the greatest respect to antiquity, but 
its final appeal was to Scripture. It accepted no 
formulary in itself of absolute authority. The 
Creeds are ^to be received and believed, for they 
may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy 
Scripture/ and, Whatever is not read therein nor 
may be proved thereby, is not to be required of 
any man.' . . . The English Reformation cor- 
responds with the English character, which is 
disinclined to seek the completeness of a Theo- 
logical system. It looks to finding Truth through 
life rather than through Logic, for Truth is not 
of the intellect only. It is patient of hesitation, 
indefiniteness, even of superficial inconsistency, 
if only the root of the matter can be held firmly 
for the guidance of conduct; for spiritual sub- 
jects are too vast to furnish clear-cut premises 
from which exhaustive conclusions can be drawn. 
So we naturally turn again and again to the his- 
toric elements in our Creed. These are of life; 
and unto life; and through life." Or, as we 
Americans express it. Only the things that belong 
to life and help life and increase life, are worth 
our while. 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 

ITS MEANING AND VALUE 

A sermon, preached at the consecration of the Rev. James 

R. Winchester, D.D., as Bishop Coadjutor of Arkansas, 

on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, 

September 29, 1911 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 

ITS MEANING AND VALUE 

"/ am the Light of the icorld: he that folloiveth Me 
shall not tcalk in darkness, hut shall have the light of 
life."— St, John 8: 12. 

HE Lord Jesus Christ is the Light 
and Life of the world. To-day, as 
I sj)eak to you, His Presence and 
the communication of His Personal 




Power are the vital forces in the progress of man- 
kind. I^ot His words, not His example, but He 
Himself is the vital Energy, that is pulsing 
through Humanity, slowly but surely redeeming, 
renewing, re-creating our mortality into Eternal 
Life. ^^He that hath the Son hath life." ' ^This 
is Life Eternal," we have His word for it, ^Ho 
know Thee, the Only true God and Jesus Christ 
whom Thou hast sent." ^ ^^I am the way, the 
truth, and the life, and no man cometh unto the 
Father but by Me." " 

I have seen the sun in the morning, obscured, 



^St. John 5: 12. 
2 St. John 17: 3 
^St. John 14: 6. 



98 THE EPISCOPAL CHUPvCH 

almost hidden, by the heavy banks of cloud, and 
then, little by little, I have seen the light absorb 
the darkness, and the heat melt and dissipate the 
vapor, until the atmosphere was clear as crystal. 
The clouds were not destroyed ; the vapor was still 
there; but it was so permeated by the light and 
heat, that its gloom was transformed into glory. 
So, I believe, the Eternal Christ is throbbing 
through life's vapors, like a fiery heart to the 
world, melting its cruelties, forging its faith, 
kindling its love, brightening its vision. 

This was the keynote of St. Paul's message, 
and his hearers so understood it. As Festus said 
to Agrippa, ^^It is a question of one Jesus, who 
was dead, and whom Paul afiirms to be alive." * 
This is what St. Paul means in the Epistle to 
the Ephesians, when he says, that the complete 
dominion of this Christ life — this Christ nature — 
in commerce, in legislation, in international rela- 
tions, in theology, in social life, in home life, 
and in individual experience, will be the fulfil- 
ment of God's ideal for the race, and the perfec- 
tion of man, as the son of God, ^^until we all 
come," he says, ^^in the unity of the faith and of 
the knowledge of the Son of God, unto the per- 
fect man." ^ 



*Acts 25: 19. 
^Ephes. 4: 13. 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 99 

"Where is one, that born of woman, altogether can escape 
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape ? 
Man, as yet, is being made; and ere the crowning Age of 

Ages, 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape? 
All about him still the shadow, but, while races flower 

and fade. 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory ever gaining on the shade, 
Till the peoples all are one, and their voices blend in 

choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker, It is finished. Man is made." 

II. And second^ this commiinication of the 
Christ Life to the world is the work of the Spirit 
of God. It is the Holy Spirit, we say in the 
Creed, who is the Lord of Life. 

Wherever we see outward, visible, material 
things organizing into system, and order, and 
beauty, and pulsing with life, there is the Holy 
Spirit of God. When all nature was chaos and 
confusion it was the Holy Spirit that moved 
upon the face of the waters and brought forth 
order and law. When God willed to become man 
for our sakes and forever unite the physical (as 
we call it) to the spiritual — the mortal manhood 
to the immortal Deity — it was the Holy Spirit 
who came upon the Virgin and overshadowed her, 
so that ^^that Holy Thing that was born of her was 
called the Son of God." ^ When at last the work 
of Jesus on earth was finished and He had as- 



' St. Luke 1 : 35. 



100 THE EPISCOPAL CHUPvCH 

cended to the Eight Hand of the Father, it was 
the Holy Spirit who came do^vn upon that hand- 
ful of bereft, perplexed disciples, and moulded 
them into an organized, definite and effective 
society, called The Church. For indeed, this 
was the Lord's promise : ^^It is expedient for you, 
that I go aw^ay; for, if I go not away, the Com- 
forter (the Spirit) will not come unto you; but, 
if I go away, I will send Him unto you/' ^ ^^He 
shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto 
you'' :^ ^^When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, 
He will guide you into all truth." ^ Therefore 
the great Apostle, on a special occasion, having 
need to assert this authority of organization in 
the Church, did not hesitate to say, ^^We have the 
mind of Christ" ;^^ and, in Avriting to the man, 
whom he had appointed as the head and ruler of 
the whole church in Ephesus, he commanded ^^The 
things which thou hast heard of me among many 
witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, 
who shall be able to teach others also," ^^ and 
^^lay hands suddenly on no man." '^ 

in. It is of vital importance to us as Chris- 



'St. John 16: 7. 

«14. 

»13. 

^n Cor. 2: 16. 

" II Timothy 2: 2. 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 101 

tians to remember that Christianity began its 
work in the world, not as an appeal to individuals, 
not as a doctrine or a philosophy, but as a family, 
a kingdom, an institution. 

The communication of the Life of the Christ 
to humanity had to begin somewhere; and it is 
remarkable, that it began, not with one man, but 
with two men together, and was at the very out- 
set a social institution. As St. John tells us 
(1: 37), two disciples of the Baptist heard Him 
speak, and they followed Him. So also the Holy 
Spirit at Pentecost descended upon all the dis- 
ciples and constituted the Church ; and it was only 
after that, that we read of the Holy Spirit being 
given to individuals. In other words the Com- 
munity, the Family, the Church, comes first, and 
is the medium of the life and grace, which is 
given through the Church to the individual. As 
St. Paul says, ^^God gave Him to be head over 
all things to the Church, which is His Body, the 
fulness of Him that filleth all in all," '^ and that 
^^hrough the Church might be known the mani- 
fold wisdom of God" ;'^ which is consistent with 
what he says elsewhere, that to be baptized into 
Christ is to be baptized into the Church.^* The 



''- 1 Tim. 5 ; 22. 

"Ephes. 1: 22; 3: 10. 

^^Galat. 3: 27 and I Cor. 12: 13. 



102 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

Church is ideally the manifestation of the gradu- 
ally expanding impartation of Christ to the world, 
and therefore it is called His Body; ^^Ye are the 
Body of Christ and members in particular." 
(I Cor. 12:27.) If that Body were perfect in 
all its parts and activities, every member of the 
Body would be a living expression of the Christ ; 
but because the Body is composed of imperfect 
human souls, because the Church is human in its 
administration though Divine in the origin and 
source of its life, we must expect failure here 
and there, where the intimacy of union with the 
Divine Lord has temporarily declined. The Lord 
knew this and anticipated it; and therefore at 
the very heart of the Body, the Church, as the 
guarantee of its essential Divine life. He Him- 
self instituted a great and solemn Ceremonial 
Action, in and by which the Life-giving Presence 
of the Living Christ should be certified and as- 
sured to the end of time. Every Celebration of 
the Holy Communion is a declaration, that the 
Lord Jesus Christ is living, now and here; that 
the Church is His Body, through which He is 
giving Himself to the world; that every man and 
woman, who in faith partakes of that Sacrament, 
is partaking of Christ; that as the life of Christ 
on earth was the life of sacrifice, so the law of 
all spiritual life is sacrifice; and finally, that the 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 103 

Minister, who, on behalf of the Church and by 
appointment of the Church, administers this Sac- 
rament, is the representative of a Priesthood, so 
high, so beautiful, that it fulfils and cro^vns all 
the types and dreams of priesthood, that in the 
past have helped and blessed the world. 

What Christ is, that the Church ought to be 
and will be; and that unrivalled priesthood of 
Jesus, whereby He through the Eternal Spirit 
offered Himself without spot to God, is the priest- 
hood of His Church, w^hich is His Body — the 
priesthood of service, of light-giving, and life- 
giving to mankind. So St. Peter says to the 
members of the Church, ^^Ye are an elect race, 
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for 
God's own possession" — ^^to offer up spiritual 
sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus 
Christ." ^^ The existence of the Church — realiz- 
ing, actualizing, the life and Presence of Christ 
by the power of the Holy Spirit, and communica- 
ting that Life to the world by its sacramental 
agencies — this, we believe, is of the very essence 
of the Gospel. 

This Church was a real and visible society on 
the Day of Pentecost, when after St. Peter's ser- 
mon, three thousand were added to it by baptism. 



^' I Peter 2 : 5. 



104 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

It has continued to be a real and visible institu- 
tion with its own principle of life, its own law, 
its own worship, its own Creed, ever since. There 
has never been a day nor an hour since Pentecost, 
when the visible and recognizable Church of 
Christ has not been existing and working in the 
world. To deny this is to deny the continuing 
Presence of the Lord, perpetually giving His 
Life through His authorized agencies to His peo- 
ple. To deny this is to make His promise of no 
effect, ^^Upon this Rock I will build My Church, 
and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against 
it." ^^ Of course the Church has been adminis- 
tered by fallible human beings. It has passed 
through many vicissitudes. In some countries 
and at some periods it has officially sunk to ap- 
parent depths of degradation. Its authority has 
been usurped by individual Bishops, by Kings 
and Emperors. Worldly and wicked ecclesiastics 
have used its power for cruelty, bigotry and 
wrong. It was rent by the schism of the East 
and West in the eleventh century, and again by 
the separation of Rome and England in the six- 
teenth century; but there has never been a time, 
when good Bishops have not been true pastors 
of their flocks, when faithful priests have not 



"St. Matt. 16: 18. 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 105 

regularly administered the sacraments, and when 
loyal and godly laymen have not devoutly and 
consistently kept the faith. And so through it 
all — ^through the fires of heathen persecution, 
through the barbarism of the sixth and seventh 
centuries, through the storm of the Reformation, 
it has continued to be the One, Holy, Catholic, and 
Apostolic Church, to which Ignatius referred in 
the year 110 A. D., and the belief in which we 
profess to-day in the great Creed of Christendom. 

IV. I have referred to St. Paul's description 
of the Church as the Body of Christ. I have 
spoken of the Holy Eucharist as the heart of the 
Body. ITow I believe that the authorized Minis- 
try, continued from age to age, ordained and ap- 
pointed according to the provisions of the Church's 
public law, is the spinal column of the Body. 
That Ministry is essentially a priesthood, because 
the Church, as I have shown, is a priestly insti- 
tution, for Christ, whom the Church represents, 
is a Priest forever. 

As to the method and manner of the con- 
tinuation of that Ministry, and its proper and 
legal appointment, the Church itself has never 
had any doubt. The First General Council met 
in Jerusalem in the year 51, and the Apostles 
were recognized as the authoritative members of 
it. The second General Council met in Nicea in 



lOG THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

A. D. 325, and the Bishops of the various dio- 
ceses rendered its decisions. The historic Church 
has never hesitated for an instant in its assertion 
of the continuity and authority of the Episcopate. 
Some Councils have debated the Papal claims. 
Other Councils have questioned the authority of 
Archbishops and Metropolitans; but every Coun- 
cil of the Church for a thousand and five hun- 
dred years has taken the Episcopate for granted. 
Indeed, if we except the sacraments of baptism 
and the Holy Communion, there is not an insti- 
tution of Christianity for which there is such 
ancient and indisputable evidence as there is for 
the Episcopate. Not even the observance of Sun- 
day; not even the doctrine of the Trinity, can be 
attested by such ancient and indisputable proof. 
For example: In the year 110 A. D., about 
ten years after the death of St. John the Apostle, 
there was a Bishop of Antioch, who had con- 
versed with St. John, and was called Christo- 
pheros, because, it was said, he had been held in 
the arms of Our Lord Himself. This Bishop, 
Ignatius, was devoured by lions in the Arena at 
Rome, because he would not deny Christ. He 
wrote seven letters to the churches of Asia Minor, 
which have been preserved, and in them he speaks 
so frequently of the Episcopal government of the 
Church, that Lightfoot says, ^^All the evidence. 



THE HISTOKIC EPISCOPATE 107 

without one dissenting voice, points to Episcopacy 
as the established form of Church government in 
Asia Minor from the close of the first century; 
and the testimony for the spread of the Episco- 
pate in this period is more abundant and more 
varied than for any other institution and event 
during this period." '^ And Professor Fisher, the 
CongTegationalist Professor of Ecclesiastical His- 
tory at Yale College wrote, ^^The institution of 
the monarchial or diocesan Episcopate may be at- 
tributed to St. John." ^^ Again, there was a man 
named Irenaeus, who was Bishop of Lyons in 
Gaul from A. D. 179 to A. D. 200. He lived 
to a great age. He was born in Asia Minor and 
was a disciple of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, 
who was a pupil of St. John. We have a bulky 
volume of the writings of Irenaeus, which have 
come down to us, and in these writings he says: 
^^We can enumerate those, who by the Apostles 
were appointed Bishops in the churches and their 
successors even to our own time." A great Mod- 
ern scholar, speaking of the reverence due the 
Bible, says, ^^Any man who wishes to know what 
the early Christians thought about the Bible can 
learn more from reading the writings of Irenaeus 
than he can by reading all the German mono- 



" Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I., p. 377. 

^^ Validity/ of Non-Episcopal Ordination, p. 4. 



108 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

graphs on the subject that have appeared in the 
past fifty years. '^ Irenaeus is a good witness for 
the Bible. He is also a good witness for the his- 
toric Episcopate. 

But, to show that this conviction was not 
limited to any one part of the Christian world 
at that time, we have the statement of a Eoman 
lawyer, Tertullian, who lived in ISTorth Africa 
before the end of the second century, as follows: 
^^If any dare to connect themselves with the 
Apostolic age, let them unfold the succession of 
their Bishops, so coming down from the begin- 
ning with continuous steps from the Apostles." 

These men lived very close to the Apostolic 
Age. St. John did not die until about the year 
100 A. D., and Irenaeus was born about 125 
A. D. Bishop White, the first Bishop of Penn- 
sylvania, was consecrated Bishop in 1784; and 
Bishop Green of Mississippi, with whom I was 
intimately associated for a number of years, was 
a friend and companion of Bishop White. Con- 
sequently I have a right to feel that I know from 
Bishop Green's conversations with me what the 
opinions and judgments of Bishop White were; 
and I am separated from Bishop White by as 
long a period of years as Irenaeus was separated 
from St. John. I regret that I have had to 
weary the congregation here this morning with 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 109 

these quotations. My argument is, that Chris- 
tianity was from the start a vital organism — an 
institution, a Church — used as a vehicle and me- 
dium by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to 
Christ's Life-giving Presence in the world; and 
my reference to the dry facts of history was only 
for the purpose of corroborating this truth. We 
believe that the life and power of Christ, in a 
special sense, are communicated to men to-day, 
in and by the sacramental ministrations of the 
organized Church; and that they were so com- 
municated during all the preceding centuries for 
eighteen hundred years. If this be true, it is 
worth while enquiring whether the Christian 
Church from the beginning has asserted and pro- 
claimed this tremendous truth. We cannot help 
appealing to history, and history without doubt 
declares that the Church has proclaimed this 
truth, in its liturgies, its Creeds, its councils, and 
its public law. 

V. It is not necessary for me to discuss at 
length the question, when and how the Church 
became conscious of the need of legislating on 
the subject of the Ministry. It is one thing to 
live, and it is another and a different thing to 
i^nquire into and determine those laws of health 
and growth by obedience to which life is promoted 
and sustained. We are quite justified in believ- 



110 THE EPISCOPAL CHUPvCH 

ing that the Church during the last half of the 
first century had a regularly constituted Minis- 
try, even though we have no official and positive 
enactments or declarations on the subject. It is 
contrary to all experience of life to expect any 
such pronouncements. The Church, for example, 
lived in the faith of Jesus Christ, as the Only- 
begotten Son of God, for at least two hundred 
years before that truth was made the subject of 
formal enactment and credal definition; and the 
Gospel itself was preached for at least thirty 
years before it was committed to writing. The 
oak is involved in the acorn; and He who made 
the seed, made the tree. 

Scholars with varying predispositions and 
motives have entered upon minute study and sjdcc- 
ulation as to the forms of ministry mentioned in 
the New Testament; as to the identity of the 
office of Bishop and Presbyter, when St. Paul 
wrote his Pastoral Epistles; as to the character 
and limitations of the charismatic ministries; as 
to the value of the evidence contained in the 
Christianized Jewish manual called the Didache; 
as to whether the authority of the Episcopate was 
to any degree advanced by the fact that Bishops 
appear to have been the financial agents of the con- 
gregations; as to whether there were any congre- 
gations in 'New Testament times which were in- 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 111 

dependent of all order and authority — and the 
results have varied, according to the predilections 
of the scholars, some of whom seem to have lost 
sight of the whole in studying the parts. The 
great, the important fact is, that Christ founded 
His Church; that the Holy Spirit vitalized it on 
the Day of Pentecost; that the ministers of that 
Church baptized converts and administered the 
Holy Communion; and that the Church of St. 
Paul and St. John was the Church of Clement 
and Ignatius and Irenaeus and Augustine and 
Gregory and Anselm and Laud; and that that 
Church is on earth to-day, witnessing by the Eu- 
charistic Oblation on a thousand thousand Altars 
throughout the world, the Presence and the Life 
of Jesus Christ her Lord. 

VI. That Life is indeed, as our text says, 
the Light of the world, and with increasing earn- 
estness and intensity good men are acknowledg- 
ing His dominion. 

For (1) the world cannot progress without a 
moral standard, a moral criterion; and all the 
genius of more than thirty generations has failed 
to invent an ideal of life equal to His. What- 
ever may be the differences of opinion among men 
as to the meaning and purpose of religion, there 
is practically no doubt in the civilized world as 
to its Highest Representative. The supreme type 



112 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

of manhood is Jesus Christ. There are Chinamen 
who are saying that to-day and trying to live up 
to it ; and Japanese, and Malays, and Indians, and 
Africans, as well as Americans and Europeans. 
There is no race of people on the earth among 
whom the appeal of the life and character of Jesus 
Christ can be said to have failed. 

And then (2) as we realize the increased em- 
phasis which is being placed to-day upon the social 
meaning of the Gospel and the social nature of its 
appeal, we cannot but be impressed with the wis- 
dom of the Lord's provision, that there should be 
an illustration of this truth in an actual society 
of men and women, where love and not envy, ser- 
vice and not selfishness, are the ideal principles 
of its existence. Such a society, which is a family, 
where there are indeed differences of gifts, differ- 
ences of function and order, but identity of life 
and purpose, based on love — such a society we be- 
lieve Christ instituted when He founded His 
Church. It is true indeed, that the Church has 
not adequately fulfilled the purpose of its Founder 
(St. Paul says we have this treasure in earthen 
vessels), and that its unhappy divisions have di- 
verted its attention from its primary aim and the 
justification of its being; but any fair-minded man 
who reads history, must admit that, to turn away 
from the historic Church is to turn away from the 



THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 113 

only institution, which for more than a thousand 
and five hundred years has continuously and con- 
sistently offered any kind of organized resistance 
to the influences and forces, which have always 
been trying, as they are now trying, to make God 
a monster and man a mere selfish animal. Talk 
as you please ; say what you will against the Medi- 
aeval Church or the eighteenth-century Church, 
there has never been a day nor an hour, when 
Bishops and priests — ^multitudes of them — ^have 
not been honestly and faithfully trying to realize 
the ideal, for which the Church was founded; 
viz. : to be an example and inspiration of social 
righteousness to the world. As an organization — 
and what is the use or value of any movement with- 
out organization? — the Church has had to have 
men exercising authority. But surely that exer- 
cise of authority has never been, in theory or inten- 
tion, either arbitrary or selfish. Always, when 
men have been set apart for the higher ministries 
of the Church, it has been understood that they 
have accepted for, and on behalf of, the people 
a responsibility for wider, deeper, and more con- 
secrated service. 

We believe that these facts deepen the respon- 
sibility and enlarge the opportunity of the Episco- 
pate in our day. The Bishop represents the uni- 
versal, the Catholic spirit of Christianity. By the 



114 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

very traditions of his office he is pledged to overgo 
and transcend all diflferences of party, all preju- 
dices of class and section. A truly Catholic 
Bishop cannot be a partisan. People, it has been 
often said, who are doubtful of their social posi- 
tion, will always be asserting it ; but a Bishop, who 
knows that he is a legitimate successor in the Apos- 
tolic Office, can afford to be broad-minded. He 
can recognize all baptized Christians as members 
of the one Catholic Church; and with due appre- 
ciation of the historic causes of our unhappy di- 
visions he can interpret rules and rubrics, so as to 
emphasize the points of agreement among all 
Christian people, and cultivate charity, good-will, 
and sympathetic understanding, one of another. 
The love of Christ constraineth us. 

Brethren: The Church of England was called 
the Bulwark of the Reformation, and we believe 
that it was the Providence of God that preserved 
in this Church the ancient order of the Episcopal 
Succession, which it is her duty to protect and to 
maintain, not as an exclusive privilege, but as a 
trust committed to her, and as basis perhaps, upon 
which all Christians may some day come together 
in visible union. Mortal men will never agree 
perfectly in their opinions or in the method of 
expressing their religious life ; but they may agree 
upon an institution; and there is no organic insti- 



THE HlSTOmC EPISCOPATE 115 

tution of Christianity so Catholic, so ancient, as 
the Historic Episcopate. 

Like St. Paul, therefore, we must magnify our 
office by cultivating the personal virtues of hu- 
mility and faith. To minimize and depreciate 
the office would be to magnify ourselves. The 
more utterly we believe in the Divine authority of 
our commission, the more humble and gentle and 
charitable shall we be in the exercise of its 
authority. 

The Lord said, in the words of my text, "I am 
the Light of the world ; he that f oUoweth Me shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light 
of Life.^' 

There is no compromise in those words — no 
suggestion of doubt, or concession, or indecision. 
Christ is all or nothing. 

So the Church of Christ, which is His Body — 
the Church which was born, not yesterday, nor in 
the sixteenth century, nor in the eleventh century, 
when Hildebrand created the Papal Monarchy; 
but which began to be on the day of Pentecost — 
so the Church of Christ to-day, as in the beginning, 
asserts her authority and appeals to men, not with 
a ^^perhaps," but with a conviction of certainty. 
At this service this morning we are assisting in 
adding one more to the list of those stewards and 
trustees of her gifts, who by God's will have been 



IIG THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

the instruments in perpetuating her long-descended 
life. It does seem a long, long time since Pente- 
cost; and some men who would like to attribute 
uncertainty and confusion to the history of the 
Church, tell us that we cannot be sure of our eccle- 
siastical genealogy or our legitimate descent. 

How foolish such talk is ! 

I remember standing in the Cathedral at Can- 
terbury three years ago and reading upon the 
tablet in the west front the list of all the Arch- 
bishops, with dates of birth, death, and consecra- 
tion, for thirteen hundred and twenty-one years. 
In the pavement of the sanctuary of our l^ew York 
Cathedral of St. John the Divine there is a Roman 
brick, taken from the Church of St. John at 
Ephesus, which was built by the Emperor Jus- 
tinian in the year 554 A. C, over the traditional 
site of St. John's grave. 

Brethren : Time is but a law of thought. The 
Church is still young. The Christ who appeared 
visibly to St. Stephen and St. Paul and St. John, 
is the Christ who is with us here to-day. 

Let us surrender ourselves to His Presence, 
and, as we set apart this our brother to the duties, 
the responsibilities, the labors of his Apostleship, 
let us listen for His Voice, saying: ^^Ye have 
not chosen Me, but I have chosen you; that ye 
should go and bring forth fruit, that your fruit 
should remain.'' 



